“I have been, but now, to visit Master and Mistress Radpath,” she returned, “and their garden is already green, with a whole row of golden daffodils nodding before the door.”
“Ah,” answered her companion, “trust Master Simon to have some foolish, useless blossoms in his garden the moment the sun peeps out of the winter clouds. Does he never remember that so much time spent on what is only bright and gaudy is not strictly in accord with our Puritan law?”
“It was with herbs from that same garden that he healed you and many of the rest of us during that dreadful season of sickness,” retorted Goody Parsons, “and did you not lie ill for two months of that summer and yet have a better harvest than any year before, because he had tended your fields along with his own?”
“Ay, and preached to me afterwards about every nettle and bramble that he found there, as though each had been one of the seven deadly sins. No, no, I like not his ways and I am weary of all this talk of how great and good a man is Master Simon. I fear me that all is not well in that bright-flowering garden of his.” The shoemaker nodded craftily, as though he knew much that he would not tell.
Goody Parsons edged nearer. She was grateful to that gentle-voiced, kind-faced Master Simon who had helped her so often in trouble; she loved him much but, alas, she loved gossip more.
“Tell me what they say, good neighbour,” she coaxed.
Samuel Skerry was provokingly silent for a space.
“They say,” he said at last, “that in that garden—beyond the tulip bed—behind the hedge—”
“Yes, yes!” she gasped as he paused again.
“There is Something hid,” he concluded—“Something that no one of us ever sees but that neighbours hear, sometimes, crying aloud.”