ate. One thought and one only
illuminated her gloom. "He ain't got his four dollars and a half,
yet," she chuckled, craftily. "Mebbe he'll get it and mebbe he won't.
We'll see."

While straying about the garden. Miss Evelina saw her unwelcome guest
take her militant departure, and reproached herself for her lack of
hospitality. Miss Mehitable had been very kind to her and deserved
only kindness in return. She had acted upon impulse and was ashamed.

Miss Evelina meditated calling her back, but the long years of
self-effacement and inactivity had left her inert, with capacity only
for suffering. That very suffering to which she had become accustomed
had of late assumed fresh phases. She was hurt continually in new
ways, yet, after the first shock of returning to her old home, not so
much as she had expected. It is a way of life, and one of its inmost
compensations--this finding of a reality so much easier than our fears.

April had come over the hills, singing, with a tinkle of rain and a
rush of warm winds, and yet the Piper had not returned. His tools were
in the shed, and the mountain of rubbish was still in the road in front
of the house. Half of the garden had not been touched. On one side of
the house was the bare brown earth, with tiny green shoots springing up
through it, and on the other was a twenty-five years' growth of weeds.
Miss Evelina reflected that the place was not unlike her own life; half
of it full of promise, a forbidding wreck in the midst of it, and,
beyond it, desolation, ended only by a stone wall.

"Did you think," asked a cheerful voice at her elbow, "that I was never
coming back to finish my job?"

Miss Evelina started, and gazed into the round, smiling face of Piper
Tom, who was accompanied, as always, by his faithful dog.

"'T is not our way," he went on, including the yellow mongrel in the
pronoun, "to leave undone what we've set our hands and paws to do, eh,
Laddie?"

He waited a moment, but Miss Evelina did not speak.

"I got some seeds for my garden," he continued, taking bulging parcels
from the pockets of his short, shaggy coat. "The year's sorrow is at
an end."

"Sorrow never comes to an end," she cried, bitterly.

"Doesn't it," he asked. "How old is yours?"

"Twenty-five years," she answered, choking. The horror of it was
pressing heavily upon her.

"Then," said the Piper, very gently, "I'm thinking there is something
wrong. No sorrow should last more