t at the throat that
Angeline was as neat a mender and darner as could be found in Suffolk
county.

A black silk bonnet snuggled close to her head, from under its brim
peeping a single pink rose. Every spring for ten years Angeline had
renewed the youth of this rose by treating its petals with the tender
red dye of a budding oak.

Under the pink rose, a soft pink flush bloomed on either of the old
lady's cheeks. Her eyes flashed with unconquerable pride, and her
square, firm chin she held very high; for now, indeed, she was filled
with terror of what "folks would say" to this home-leaving, and it was a
bright June afternoon, too clear for an umbrella with which to hide
one's face from prying neighbors, too late in the day for a sunshade.

Angy tucked the green-black affair which served them as both under her
arm and swung Abe's figured old carpet-bag in her hand with the manner
of one setting out on a pleasant journey. Abe, though resting heavily on
his stout, crooked cane, dragged behind him Angy's little horsehair
trunk upon a creaking, old, unusually large, toy express-wagon which he
had bought at some forgotten auction long ago.

The husband and wife passed into the garden between borders of boxwood,
beyond which nodded the heads of Angy's carefully tended, out-door
"children"--her roses, her snowballs, her sweet-smelling syringas, her
wax-like bleeding-hearts, and her shrub of bridal-wreath.

"Jest a minute," she murmured, as Abe would have hastened on to the
gate. She bent her proud head and kissed with furtive, half-ashamed
passion a fluffy white spray of the bridal-wreath. Now overtopping the
husband's silk hat, the shrub had not come so high as his knee when they
two had planted it nearly a half-century ago.

"You're mine!" Angy's heart cried out to the shrub and to every growing
thing in the garden. "You're mine. I planted you, tended you, loved you
into growing. You're all the children I ever had, and I'm leaving you."

But the old wife did not pluck a single flower, for she could never
bear to see a blossom wither in her hand, while all she said aloud was:
"I'm glad 't was Mis' Holmes that bought in the house. They say she's a
great hand ter dig in the garden."

Angy's voice faltered. Abe did not answer. Something had caused a
swimming before his eyes which he did not wish his wife to see; so he
let fall the handle of the express-wagon and, bending his slow back,
plucked a sprig of "old-man." Though