In going over the hill’s brow and on to the vague unknown, the road led past Charleroy College whither the lads within twenty miles came to acquire knowledge. The residential portion of Roseborough, comprising about sixty houses and gardens, spread about the hillsides between the village and Charleroy.
The sun fell aslant over the garden and the orchard, as if indeed it had cast a golden net about Villa Rose to snare the willing lady thereof in a witchery from which she might never escape. To decide that this was to be the great day of her life, a day of splendid adventure, was one thing; to make it so—to make any day a day of adventure in Roseborough—was quite another. Pondering ways and means of conjuring up romance, she fluttered about among the blazing dahlia beds like a huge lavender butterfly.
“Oh!” She stopped suddenly. “I shall not deserve my Wonderful Day if I don’t take Mrs. Lee her flowers and her fruit, as usual.”
She ran back to the verandah and picked up a willow basket containing stout gloves and shears and returned to the flower beds. She lingered only a moment or two among the dahlias. Beyond their haughty glory lay the rose garden, a radiant and random half acre spilling forth every tint and perfume known to the rose family. Here Rosamond’s shears went to work busily. She found delight in the task, for she hummed again the little minuet theme which she had recomposed into this day’s salutation to herself.
When one is young, not only with the fearless years but with the brave desires of youth and eager for fairy tale happenings, so that every other sentence begins with “I wonder!” one must talk; and if fate has set one in a high and lonely place with no young, imaginative twin soul to companion one’s dreams, then one must talk to oneself—not merely in silence but with the uttered phrase. Rosamond talked to herself habitually.
She was musing aloud now:
“I wonder how it would feel to own all this—Villa Rose and its gardens—with love, and then to lose it—and love, too. Mrs. Lee did. I’m afraid I couldn’t be sweet about it, as she is.” She concluded presently that in such circumstances she would even feel resentful when flowers were brought to her from the garden that had once been hers.
She pictured Mrs. Lee in thought as she would see her presently—seated in her bit of garden, knitting, or perhaps indoors, lovingly sorting and dusting the precious (and, it must be confessed, prosy) manuscripts written by her husband during his forty years as professor of literature at Charleroy. She would hear the gentle voice greeting her lovingly—not because she was the rich Mrs. Mearely but because Mrs. Lee instinctively greeted all the world lovingly. Under the white hair and dainty, white lace cap, the kind eyes, which had seen seventy years of life—with its human sun and shadow—go by, would beam out of the delicately wrinkled face with a delight in the flowers’ beauty and fragrance as spontaneous and young as youth itself—the spirit which discounts time because its habitation is with the good and the eternal.
“Maybe it is because she never thinks of herself that she has never found out that she hasn’t things any more.”
Mrs. Lee’s ability to be happy, even after fate had bereft her of everything, was a subject full of unusual interest for Rosamond this morning. By some art this lonely woman, past her seventieth milestone, managed to make every day of her life her “wonderful day.” The song of her “Good-morning!” came out of a deep-toned, divine joy which neither age, poverty, nor grief could blur. The wistful look was in Rosamond’s eyes again as she passed out of the rose garden and into the orchard on her way to make her daily offering.