There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina
Adams's. All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the
early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in
the new country, flourished there. The naturalized pinks and phlox
and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance
by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina's
garden, and no one dreamed what they meant to Evelina; and she did
not dream herself, for her heart was always veiled to her own eyes,
like the face of a nun. The roses and pinks, the poppies and
heart's-ease, were to this maiden-woman, who had innocently and
helplessly outgrown her maiden heart, in the place of all the loves
of life which she had missed. Her affections had forced an outlet in
roses; they exhaled sweetness in pinks, and twined and clung in
honeysuckle-vines. The daffodils, when they came up in the spring,
comforted her like the smiles of children; when she saw the first
rose, her heart leaped as at the face of a lover.
She had lost the one way of human affection, but her feet had found a
little single side-track of love, which gave her still a zest in the
journey of life. Even in the winter Evelina had her flowers, for she
kept those that would bear transplanting in pots, and all the sunny
windows in her house were gay with them.
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