Her back was very stiff and straight when she marched downhill, firmly determined to abandon Evelina, scorn Doctor Ralph Dexter, and leave Araminta to her well-deserved fate.  One thought and one only illuminated her gloom.  “He ain’t got his four dollars and a half, yet,” she chuckled, craftily.  “Mebbe he’ll get it and mebbe he won’t.  We’ll see.”

While straying about the garden.  Miss Evelina saw her unwelcome guest take her militant departure, and reproached herself for her lack of hospitality.  Miss Mehitable had been very kind to her and deserved only kindness in return.  She had acted upon impulse and was ashamed.

Miss Evelina meditated calling her back, but the long years of self-effacement and inactivity had left her inert, with capacity only for suffering.  That very suffering to which she had become accustomed had of late assumed fresh phases.  She was hurt continually in new ways, yet, after the first shock of returning to her old home, not so much as she had expected.  It is a way of life, and one of its inmost compensations—­this finding of a reality so much easier than our fears.

April had come over the hills, singing, with a tinkle of rain and a rush of warm winds, and yet the Piper had not returned.  His tools were in the shed, and the mountain of rubbish was still in the road in front of the house.  Half of the garden had not been touched.  On one side of the house was the bare brown earth, with tiny green shoots springing up through it, and on the other was a twenty-five years’ growth of weeds.  Miss Evelina reflected that the place was not unlike her own life; half of it full of promise, a forbidding wreck in the midst of it, and, beyond it, desolation, ended only by a stone wall.

“Did you think,” asked a cheerful voice at her elbow, “that I was never coming back to finish my job?”

Miss Evelina started, and gazed into the round, smiling face of Piper Tom, who was accompanied, as always, by his faithful dog.

“’T is not our way,” he went on, including the yellow mongrel in the pronoun, “to leave undone what we’ve set our hands and paws to do, eh, Laddie?”

He waited a moment, but Miss Evelina did not speak.

“I got some seeds for my garden,” he continued, taking bulging parcels from the pockets of his short, shaggy coat.  “The year’s sorrow is at an end.”

“Sorrow never comes to an end,” she cried, bitterly.

“Doesn’t it,” he asked.  “How old is yours?”

“Twenty-five years,” she answered, choking.  The horror of it was pressing heavily upon her.

“Then,” said the Piper, very gently, “I’m thinking there is something wrong.  No sorrow should last more than a year—­’t is written all around us so.”

“Written?  I have never seen it written.”

“No,” returned the Piper, kindly, “but ’t is because you have not looked to see.  Have you ever known a tree that failed to put out its green leaves in the Spring, unless it had died from lightning or old age?  When a rose blossoms, then goes to sleep, does it wait for more than a year before it blooms again?  Is it more than a year from bud to bud, from flower to flower, from fruit to fruit?  ’T is God’s way of showing that a year of darkness is enough,—­at a time.”