't she have gone home? You said she was from the country.
Wouldn't they let her come back home?"

Mrs. Mundy shook her head. "Her own mother was dead and her stepmother
wouldn't let her come. She had young children of her own. Last month
she tried to end it all. She won't be here much longer. The doctor
says she'll hardly live six months. If we can get her in the City
Home--"

"The City Home!" The memory of what I had seen there came over me
protestingly. The girl had lived in hell. She need not die in it.
"Perhaps she can be sent somewhere in the country," I said, after a
while. "Mr. Guard might know of some one who will take her. Certainly
she can stay here until--until he knows what is best to do."

Mrs. Mundy got up. For a moment she looked at me, started to say
something, then went out of the room. She was crying. I wonder if I
said anything I shouldn't.

"Tell me of your mother's garden." I picked up the tiny flower and put
it on Lillie's cot, where its fragrance waked faint stirrings of other
days. "I've always wanted a garden like my grandmother Heath used to
have. I remember it very well, though I was only nine when she died.
There were cherry-trees and fig-trees in it, and a big arbor covered
with scuppernong grape-vines, and wonderful strawberries in one corner.
All of her flowers were the old-fashioned kind. There was a beautiful
yellow rose that grew all over the fence which separated the flowers
from the vegetables, and close to the wood-house was a big moss-rose
bush. There were Micrafella roses, too. I loved them best, and
Jacqueminots, and tea-roses, and--"

"Did she have princess-feather in hers, and candytuft, and
sweet-williams?" Lillie turned over on her side, her hand under her
cheek, and in her eyes a quick, eager glow. "In mother's garden were
all sorts of old-fashioned flowers also. We lived two miles from town
and father sold vegetables and chickens to the market-men, who sold
them to their customers. But he never had as good luck with his
vegetables as mother had with her flowers. She loved them so. There
was a big mock-orange bush right by the well. Did you ever shut your
eyes and see things again just as they were a long time ago? If I were
blind-folded and my hands tied behind me I could find just where every
flower used to grow in mother's garden, if I could go in it again."

Like a flood overleaping the barrier that held it back, the words came
eagerly.