As for Evelina, when she got his letter, and had read it through, she sat still and white for a long time, and did not seem to hear when old Sarah Judd spoke to her.  But at last she rose and went to her chamber, and knelt down, and prayed for a long time; and then she went out in the garden and cut all the most beautiful flowers, and tied them in wreaths and bouquets, and carried them out to the north side of the house, where her cousin Evelina was buried, and covered her grave with them.  And then she knelt down there, and hid her face among them, and said, in a low voice, as if in a listening ear, “I pray you, Cousin Evelina, forgive me for what I am about to do.”

And then she returned to the house, and sat at her needlework as usual; but the old woman kept looking at her, and asking if she were sick, for there was a strange look in her face.

She and old Sarah Judd had always their tea at five o’clock, and put the candles out at nine, and this night they did as they were wont.  But at one o’clock in the morning young Evelina stole softly down the stairs with her lighted candle, and passed through into the kitchen; and a half-hour after she came forth into the garden, which lay in full moonlight, and she had in her hand a steaming teakettle, and she passed around among the shrubs and watered them, and a white cloud of steam rose around them.  Back and forth she went to the kitchen; for she had heated the great copper wash-kettle full of water; and she watered all the shrubs in the garden, moving amid curling white wreaths of steam, until the water was gone.  And then she set to work and tore up by the roots with her little hands and trampled with her little feet all the beautiful tender flower-beds; all the time weeping, and moaning softly:  “Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina!  Oh, forgive me, poor Cousin Evelina!”

And at dawn the garden lay in ruin, for all the tender plants she had torn up by the roots and trampled down, and all the stronger-rooted shrubs she had striven to kill with boiling water and salt.

Then Evelina went into the house, and made herself tidy as well as she could when she trembled so, and put her little shawl over her head, and went down the road to the Merriams’ house.  It was so early the village was scarcely astir, but there was smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney at the Merriams’; and when she knocked, Mrs. Merriam opened the door at once, and stared at her.

“Is Sarah Judd dead?” she cried; for her first thought was that something must have happened when she saw the girl standing there with her wild pale face.

“I want to see the minister,” said Evelina, faintly, and she looked at Thomas’s mother with piteous eyes.

“Be you sick?” asked Mrs. Merriam.  She laid a hard hand on the girl’s arm, and led her into the sitting-room, and put her into the rocking-chair with the feather cushion.  “You look real poorly,” said she.  “Sha’n’t I get you a little of my elderberry wine?”