“‘Dr. Marchant, Dr. Russell, and I were college mates,’ said Martin, briefly, ’and after he and his son died so suddenly I was told that his widow was mentally ill and that none could see her, and later that she had died, or else the wording was so that I inferred as much,’ and the very recollection seemed to set Martin dreaming.  And I did not wonder, for there had never been a more brilliant and devoted couple than Abbie and Chester Marchant, and I still remember the shock of it when word came that both father and son had been killed by the same runaway accident, though it was nearly twenty years ago.

“’She was ill, sir, was Mrs. Marchant; too ill to see anybody.  For a long time she wouldn’t believe that the accident had happened, and when she really sensed it, she was as good as dead for nigh five years.  One day some of her people came to me—­’twas the year after my own husband died—­and asked if I would take a lady and her nurse here to live with me for the summer.  They told me of her sickness and how she was always talking of some cottage in a garden of sweet-smelling flowers where she had lived one happy summer with her husband and her boy, and they placed the house as mine.

“’Her folks said the doctors thought if she could get back here for a time that it might help her.  Then I recollected that ten years before, when I went up to Maine to visit my sister, I’d rented the place, just as it stood, to folks of the name of Marchant, a fine couple that didn’t look beyond each other unless ’twas at their son.  In past times my grandmother had an old-country knack of raising healing herbs and all sorts of sweet-smelling things, along with farm truck, so that folks came from all about to buy them and doctors too, for such things weren’t sold so much in shops in those days as they are now, and so this place came to be called the Herb Farm.  After that it was sold off, little by little, until the garden, wood lane, and orchard is about all that’s left.

“’I was lonesome and liked the idea of company, and besides I was none too well fixed; yet I dreaded a mournful widow that wasn’t all there anyway, according to what they said, but I thought I’d try.  Well, sir, she come, and that first week I thought I’d never stand it, she talked and wrung her hands so continual.  But one day what do you think happened?  I chanced to pick a nosegay, not so much fine flowers perhaps as good-smelling leaves and twigs, and put it in a little pitcher in her room.

“’It was like witchcraft the way it worked; the smell of those things seemed to creep over her like some drugs might and she changed.  She stopped moaning and went out into the garden and touched all the posies with her fingers, as if she was shaking hands, and all of a sudden it seemed, by her talk, as if her dead were back with her again; and on every other point she’s been as clear and ladylike as possible ever since, and from that day she cast off her black clothes as if wearing ’em was all through a mistake.