One evening--it was the first week in June, about nine months after Frank's adventure in the garden--Adèle Rougeant was tending her flowers.
She had been sewing for a time, and now, feeling a want of relaxation, she went to her parterre. Her violin and her flowers were her only companions. No wonder she fled to them when inclined to be sorrowful.
How beautiful the flower-bed looked in the twilight! The weather had been very warm, the earth which had been previously battered down by heavy rains was now covered with small cracks, little mouths as it were, begging for water.
Adèle supplied them plentifully with the precious liquid.
Then she armed herself with a pair of gardening gloves, and an old mason's trowel (any instrument is good to a woman), and began to plant a row of lobelias all around her pelargoniums.
This done, she looked at her work. There is a pleasure in gazing upon well-trimmed borders, but this pleasure is increased tenfold when one thinks that the plants have been arranged by one's own hands.
The young lady felt this delight: she felt more, she experienced the soothing influence of nature's sweet converse. She looked at the primroses, whose slender stalks were bent and which touched each other as if engaged in silent intercourse. And thus they would die, she thought, locked in each others fond embrace, their task accomplished, their life but one stretch of mutual love.
"Ah love! What is love?" she said to herself. But immediately a score of answers came; a dozen vague definitions presented themselves. "Certainly," she mused, "the parents who toil for their children without thinking of reward; love." Then another self within her answered: "It is their duty." "Their duty, yes, but they are not often actuated by a sense of duty; I think it is love."
Then she thought about another kind of love--the love she felt for Frank Mathers. She asked herself why she loved him. He was not bold, and she admired boldness. That she loved him, however, she was certain. Did he love her? "Yes," she thought he did. Then what kept them apart? Who was the cause of it? Her father. "What a pity I have such a father," she sighed; "not content with making himself miserable, he makes me pass a life of anxiety."