sort of exultation, so
blithely, indeed, that the calmly moving fingers of the mistress of
Heartholm were suddenly arrested. A feeling as powerful and associative
as the scent of a strong perfume stole over Evelyn Strang.

Before she could speak Berber had resumed his weeding. "It's good to get
dictatorship over all this fight of growing," looking up for her
sympathy with hesitance, which, seen in the light of his acknowledged
genius, was the more significant. "You don't mind my taking Michael's
place? He was very busy this morning. I have no credentials, but my
mother seems to think I am a born gardener."

This lack of conceit, this unassuming practicality, the sort of thing
with which Gargoyle's mind had been carefully inoculated for a long
time, baffled, while it reassured Mrs. Strang. Also the sense of sacred
trust placed in her hands made her refrain from any psychic probing.

For a long while she found it easy to exert this self-control. The
lonely woman, impressed by the marvelous "cure" of John Berber,
magnetized by his youth and sunny enthusiasms back to the old dreaming
pleasure in the Heartholm gardens, might in the absorbed days to come
have forgotten--only there was a man's photograph in her bedroom, placed
where her eyes always rested on it, her hand could bring it to her lips;
the face looking out at her seemed to say but one thing:

"_You knew me--I knew you. What we knew and were to each other had not
only to do with our bodies. Men call me 'dead' but you know that I am
not. Why do you not study and work and pray to learn what I am become,
that you may turn to me, that I may reach to you?_"

Mockwooders, dropping in at Heartholm for afternoon tea, began to
accustom themselves to finding Mrs. Strang sitting near some flower-bed
where John Berber worked, or going with him over his great books of
specimens. The smirk the fashionable world reserves for anything not
usual in its experience was less marked in this case than it might have
been in others. Even those who live in "residential parks" are sometimes
forced (albeit with a curious sense of personal injury) to accept the
idea that they who have greatly suffered find relief in "queer" ways.
Mockwooders, assisting at the Heartholm tea-hour, and noting Berber
among other casual guests, merely felt aggrieved and connoted
"queerness."

For almost a year, with the talking over of plans for John Strang's
long-cherished idea of a forest garden at Heartho