“I’m not so old as to want help, you know,” continued the old gardener; “but the madam——”
“I think you said she had lived here from a child?”
The stranger’s voice was hoarse and constrained, as he interrupted the old man with this question.
The gardener brushed back the gray hair from his ears, as if something in the voice bewildered him; then he answered,
“Why, everybody here knows that. The big wooden house is gone, but that heap of stone stands over the old cellar, and she lives like a queen where her father died. The great difference is, she picks roses where he sold leets and carrots; and them green-houses stand just where his pigpens were. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“But you have not told me who the lady is?”
“Not told you? Ha! ha! As if everybody didn’t know Mrs. Lambert.”
“The lady is married, then?”
These words fell heavily, like drops of lead, from the stranger’s white lips, and his hand, which clasped the railing, tightened spasmodically around the iron.
“Married! Why that was years and years ago. She went across the seas to some foreign countries after her father died, and came back with a husband and a son.”