moment outside and looked down over the shadowy
fields; then they went in, without speaking. The great day was over,
and they shut the door.

THE ONLY ROSE.

I.

Just where the village abruptly ended, and the green mowing fields
began, stood Mrs. Bickford's house, looking down the road with all its
windows, and topped by two prim chimneys that stood up like ears. It
was placed with an end to the road, and fronted southward; you could
follow a straight path from the gate past the front door and find
Mrs. Bickford sitting by the last window of all in the kitchen, unless
she were solemnly stepping about, prolonging the stern duties of her
solitary housekeeping.

One day in early summer, when almost every one else in Fairfield had
put her house plants out of doors, there were still three flower pots
on a kitchen window sill. Mrs. Bickford spent but little time over her
rose and geranium and Jerusalem cherry-tree, although they had gained
a kind of personality born of long association. They rarely undertook
to bloom, but had most courageously maintained life in spite of their
owner's unsympathetic but conscientious care. Later in the season she
would carry them out of doors, and leave them, until the time of
frosts, under the shade of a great apple-tree, where they might make
the best of what the summer had to give.

The afternoon sun was pouring in, the Jerusalem cherry-tree drooped
its leaves in the heat and looked pale, when a neighbor, Miss
Pendexter, came in from the next house but one to make a friendly
call. As she passed the parlor with its shut blinds, and the
sitting-room, also shaded carefully from the light, she wished, as she
had done many times before, that somebody beside the owner might have
the pleasure of living in and using so good and pleasant a house.
Mrs. Bickford always complained of having so much care, even while she
valued herself intelligently upon having the right to do as she
pleased with one of the best houses in Fairfield. Miss Pendexter was a
cheerful, even gay little person, who always brought a pleasant flurry
of excitement, and usually had a genuine though small piece of news to
tell, or some new aspect of already received information.

Mrs. Bickford smiled as she looked up to see this sprightly neighbor
coming. She had no gift at entertaining herself, and was always glad,
as one might say, to be taken off her own hands.

Miss Pendexter smiled back, as if she felt herself to be