een
too much occupied with his own concerns to give her the needed help or
money so that she could carry out her plans. The last year she had lost
heart in many ways, so that little or nothing had been accomplished
of all she had dreamed. It would have been laughable, had it not been
pathetic, to see John Hathaway dig, delve, grub, sow, water, weed,
transplant, generally at the wrong moment, in that dream-garden
of Susanna's. He asked no advice and read no books. With feverish
intensity, with complete ignorance of Nature's laws and small sympathy
with their intricacies, he dug, hoed, raked, fertilized, and planted
during that lonely summer. His absentmindedness caused some expensive
failures, as when the wide expanse of Susanna's drying ground, which
was to be velvety lawn, "came up" curly lettuce; but he rooted out his
frequent mistakes and patiently planted seeds or roots or bulbs over and
over and over and over, until something sprouted in his beds, whether
it was what he intended or not. While he weeded the brilliant orange
nasturtiums, growing beside the magenta portulacca in a friendly
proximity that certainly would never have existed had the mistress of
the house been the head-gardener, he thought of nothing but his wife. He
knew her pride, her reserve, her sensitive spirit; he knew her love of
truth and honor and purity, the standards of life and conduct she had
tried to hold him to so valiantly, and which he had so dragged in the
dust during the blindness and the insanity of the last two years.

He, John Hathaway, was a deserted husband; Susanna had crept away all
wounded and resentful. Where was she living and how supporting herself
and Sue, when she could not have had a hundred dollars in the world?
Probably Louisa was the source of income; conscientious, infernally
disagreeable Louisa!

Would yet the rumor of his changed habit of life reach her by some means
in her place of hiding, sooner or later? Would she not yearn for a sight
of Jack? Would she not finally give him a chance to ask forgiveness, or
had she lost every trace of affection for him, as her letter seemed to
imply? He walked the garden paths, with these and other unanswerable
questions, and when he went to his lonely room at night, he held the
lamp up to a bit of poetry that he had cut from a magazine and pinned to
the looking-glass. If John Hathaway could be brought to the reading
of poetry, he might even glance at the Bible in course of time,