rising with something of her old manner, "I must show you what
I have been doing all these years. You must admire my garden."

I followed her, marvelling, along the shell path, and there came
unbidden to my mind the garden at Temple Bow, where she had once been
wont to sit, tormenting Mr. Mason or bending to the tale of Harry
Riddle's love. Little she cared for flowers in those days, and now they
had become her life. With such thoughts in my mind, I listened unheeding
to her talk. The place was formerly occupied by a shiftless fellow, a
tailor; and the court, now a paradise, had been a rubbish heap. That
orange tree which shaded the uneven doorway of the kitchen she had found
here. Figs, pomegranates, magnolias; the camellias dazzling in their
purity; the blood-red oleanders; the pink roses that hid the crumbling
adobe and climbed even to the sloping tiles,--all these had been set
out and cared for with her own hands. Ay, and the fragrant bed of yellow
jasmine over which she lingered,--Antoinette's favorite flower.

Antoinette's flowers that she wore in her hair! In her letters Mrs.
Temple had never mentioned Antoinette, and now she read the question
(perchance purposely put there) in my eyes. Her voice faltered sadly.
Scarce a week had she been in the house before Antoinette had found her.

"I--I sent the girl away, David. She came without Monsieur de St. Gre's
knowledge, without his consent. It is natural that he thinks me--I will
not say what. I sent Antoinette away. She clung to me, she would not go,
and I had to be--cruel. It is one of the things which make the nights
long--so long. My sins have made her life unhappy."

"And you hear of her? She is not married?" I asked.

"No, she is not married," said Mrs. Temple, stooping over the jasmines.
Then she straightened and faced me, her voice shaken with earnestness.
"David, do you think that Nick still loves her?"

Alas, I could not answer that. She bent over the jasmines again.

"There were five years that I knew nothing," she continued. "I did not
dare ask Mr. Clark, who comes to me on business, as you know. It was
Mr. Clark who brought back Lindy on one of his trips to Charleston. And
then, one day in March of this year, Madame de Montmery came."

"Madame de Montmery?" I repeated.

"It is a strange story," said Mrs. Temple. "Lindy had never admitted any
one, save Mr. Clark. One day early in the spring, when I was trimming my
roses by the wall there, the girl