For a moment she looked puzzled. Then she knew.
“Miss Moran! Well, if she isn’t the greatest! She could make anybody garden; was it flowers or vegetables?”
“Beans.”
“Too bad,” said Peg, regretfully. “Of course it’s all nice and exciting and like helping God with his chores, but flowers seem best. They’re so perfectly lovely when they come up and blossom—but then, I love string beans, don’t you? Only they’re just green and I think it’s more fun to help make something bright colored.”
“Did you ever have a garden of your own?” Archibald asked. They had reached the shack now and he dropped down on the doorstep and filled his pipe. Pegeen sat down beside him, after carefully turning up the abbreviated skirt of her new dress.
“No use dirtying it any faster than I have to,” she explained. “Every washing takes it out of them even when they aren’t pink. No, I never had a garden—what you’d call a real garden. We never had much garden. Sometimes Dad would put in corn or potatoes but mostly he forgot, and if he didn’t forget them, he did after he’d put them in, and I didn’t have much time to take care of them. I had some poppies once though, perfectly wonderful poppies. Miss Moran gave me the seeds. I hadn’t ever planted any flower seeds at all till one day I was down at her house and she was working in the flower garden and let me help. I sowed some seed of those great big blue larkspur—delphiniums she calls them, but I think larkspur’s nicest, don’t you?—and some poppies too. Poppies have got the cunningest baby seeds that you don’t dare cover up warm at all for fear you’ll choke them to death. She let me take some poppy seed home, and I dug a place right outside Mother’s window. She was sick then, you know, and after the poppies blossomed, I used to get Mother up every single day to see them. They were the gladdest, brightest, danciest things, but they used to make Mother sort of sad sometimes.”
She sat quiet for a few moments, looking out with wistful eyes toward the far hills, and Archibald laid a large hand over the two small ones clasped in her lap. The sober little face flashed a quick response. Happiness was always knocking at the door of Pegeen’s heart even when sorrow housed there.
“My poppies down at Miss Moran’s were nice too,” she went on, “but I was awfully disappointed about my larkspur. It didn’t bloom a bit that summer, and Miss Moran had said it would be blue, and I like blue best of anything, don’t you? It isn’t so bright as red, but it’s such a way-deep-down-glad color. Well, that fall, Miss Moran had me move the larkspur plants over by the lily bed; and one day the next summer, when I hadn’t been up there for weeks, John came after me with the horse and said Miss Moran wanted me in a hurry. I was afraid she was sick, but she wasn’t She just grabbed me when I got there and said:
“ ‘Peggy O’Neill, you’ve been working miracles. Come along quick and see them.’
“So we held hands and raced to the garden and there were my larkspurs all blossoming—a great big patch of them with white lilies cuddling up close to them! Blue? Why, you never saw anything bluer. I looked at them and my legs went wobbly and I flopped right down and cried. Yes, sir, honestly I did. I couldn’t stand having helped God make anything so beautiful. He was used to it but I wasn’t. Isn’t it wonderful that He could think of so many perfectly splendid things to make in seven days? There’s no telling what He’d have done, if He’d taken a year to do it. Did you ever try to think of something more that would have been awfully nice and that He could have done if He’d taken more time? I’ve tried lots of times, but I never could. It seems as if He hadn’t forgotten a thing.