“But, say, Betty,” Tolly revived enough to say, “we are not going to tell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink.  They are going out to-morrow to call.  Let ’em go—­it’s coming to ’em.”

“Oh no, I won’t say a word,” I agreed, with the intensest joy.  “Come over to-morrow, Edith, and let’s finish My Lady’s Fan.  I’m dying to know what happened to her at the court ball.  Good night!”

“No, you come over to my house; I’ll be in bed,” Edith wailed from the middle of the road as Tolly turned and made his machine buzz for home.

Then for five days—­glorious, warm, growing, blooming days—­I stayed in town in a state of relapse from gardening of which the sorenesses in the calves of my legs and my thumbs were the strongest symptoms, and listened to my martyred friends’ accounts of what Sam was doing to Peter.  I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-delivery route.  That is, they were in Peter’s handwriting, but they read more like government crop reports than a poet’s letters to the girl to whom he considered himself engaged.  I sent them on to Judge Vandyne, and I got a glorious written chuckle in return for them.

Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson’s book.  It was full time—­maybe past time—­for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos.  I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden.  Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch across the top of its nose.  The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by Sam for lice under her wings.

“Yes, but what about the play, Peter dear?” I asked, after we had weeded and dug and watered and pulled up for an hour or two and had then seated ourselves at the end of one of the long rows to rest.

“The play—­oh, Betty, it is—­” And his old look of rapture shot across his face.  Then Sam yelled to him, and me, too.

“Come on and help tie up onions,” he called.  “You Byrd!”

We went and we tied up—­a whole white smelly mountain of them; but I didn’t care, for Sam showed me his day-book, and in just one week his balance had shot up like the beautiful pink pie-plant in my garden.  A great big entry was from my beets that he had thinned and sold without waiting for me.

“I’ll give you a check when they are all sold, Betty,” he said, in a business-like way, and something in me made me glory in him and my beets.  “And isn’t old Pete hitting the agricultural pace in fine style?” he asked, as we walked out into my garden between the rows of my blush peonies which had been grateful for the bone meal, and had bloomed, though everybody who had given me the clumps had warned me that they wouldn’t flower until the second season.