“Eh, it is many a long year,” she said, “since I walked in the lanes of Hertfordshire before my marriage day and thought the world was abloom for me alone. Yet it might have been yesterday save for the memory of him who has been so long dead.”
She rested at last upon the bench under the linden tree, dreaming of the never-to-be-forgotten beauty of that still June evening in England, fifty years ago.
“But who can call it so far gone by,” she said to herself at last, “when the same rose that I plucked that night from the vine on the cottage wall, still blooms beside my doorstep here in the New World. It is a good God that gives us the flowers to hold our youth and old age together.”
She sat for some little time, her chin upon her hand, looking across the banks of white flowers and sniffing at the fragrance that filled the warm air, but finally rose with a determined mien.
“I sit dreaming here like a foolish old crone,” she muttered, “and forget my errand so that those two young things will be coming back to laugh at me and my old-fashioned ways. Ah, but I mind how my mother stood in the bright Spring sunshine and told the bees of my wedding day, while Jock Parsons and I sat laughing upon the doorstep and said it was no use. That is the way of youth!”
As she was walking across the grass toward the row of beehives under the apple trees, her attention was attracted by a little twinkling light that shone out from Samuel Skerry’s cottage. She stood a moment to watch it idly and then became aware that it was moving toward her, jerking and halting, it was true, but passing very slowly down the path toward the gap in the hedge.
“Now what can the rascal have on foot?” she questioned. “Nothing good, for that I will answer.”
The light came through the hedge and advanced slowly up through the garden. She could see Samuel Skerry now, leaning over as he shuffled along, carrying a candle in one hand and something heavy and awkward in the other. Presently he paused, set his burden down and turning, hurried back the way he had come. Consumed with curiosity, Goody Parsons hobbled forward as fast as she could to see what he had left.
“I would give my best new bonnet,” she told herself, “the one I bought seven years ago last Michaelmas, to know what the villain is about!”