own
the stairs and into the drawing-room.

"Did he take it?" she asked.

"Of course he took it," Dolph answered, bitterly, "at that price."

"Did he say anything," she inquired again, "about its being hard for us
to--to sell it?"

"He said we had better not sell it now--that it would bring more a few
years hence."

"He doesn't understand," said Mrs. Dolph.

"He _couldn't_ understand," said Mr. Dolph.

Then she went over to him and kissed him.

"It's only selling the garden, after all," she said; "it isn't like
selling our home."

He put his arm about her waist, and they walked into the breakfast-room,
and looked out on the garden which to-morrow would be theirs no longer,
and in a few months would not be a garden at all.

High walls hemmed it in--the walls of the houses which had grown up
around them. A few stalks stood up out of the snow, the stalks of
old-fashioned flowers--hollyhock and larkspur and Job's-tears and the
like--and the lines of the beds were defined by the tiny hedges of box,
with the white snow-powder sifted into their dark, shiny green. The
bare rose-bushes were there, with their spikes of thorns, and little
mounds of snow showed where the glories of the poppy-bed had bloomed.

Jacob Dolph, looking out, saw the clear summer sunlight lying where the
snow lay now. He saw his mother moving about the paths, cutting a flower
here and a bud there. He saw himself, a little boy in brave breeches,
following her about, and looking for the harmless toads, and working
each one into one of the wonderful legends which he had heard from the
old German gardener across the way. He saw his father, too, pacing those
paths of summer evenings, when the hollyhocks nodded their pink heads,
and glancing up, from time to time, at his mother as she sat knitting at
that very window. And, last of all in the line, yet first in his mind,
he saw his wife tripping out in the fresh morning, to smile on the
flowers she loved, to linger lovingly over the beds of verbena, and to
pick the little nosegay that stood by the side of the tall coffee-urn at
every summer-morning breakfast.

And the wife, looking out by his side, saw that splendid boy of theirs
running over path and bed, glad of the flowers and the air and the
freedom, full of young life and boyish sprightliness, his long hair
floating behind him, the light of hope and youth in his bright face.

And to-morrow it would be Van Riper's; and very soon there would be