"I don't change, I think," she answered, with a proud little lift of the head.
"Don't you? Well, as I don't either, that ought to satisfy me. Yet it does n't quite, after all. It's odd, but I believe just being good friends who don't change is n't enough. Oh, don't go! You're not angry? Yes, I know it's late, but I 've hardly seen you yet. You will go?--But you 'll let me come over early to-morrow--after more than a year away? Well, then, to-morrow I 'll have to teach you not to be afraid of me. On my honour I 'm not carrying a 'gun!' Wait a minute--just a minute! ... How did I ever stay away from you so long? ... --Good night, little Jane--good night!"
CHAPTER XI
IN THE GARDEN
Winter--long and cold; spring--late and slow; then, all at once, in June, radiant summer and the little garden round the corner in Gay Street was a place of richly bursting bloom--a riot of colours against the leafy green background of its vine-hung walls.
Toward the end of June a week of almost tropical heat had made the evenings outdoors, on the little porch, and in the garden itself, events to be looked forward to throughout the day, Joseph Bell, Peter, Ross, and Rufus, thought of them many times during the hottest day of all--midsummer, the twenty-first of the month--and came home at night to find the table laid for a cool-looking supper out under the shadow of the maple, and Mrs. Bell, Jane, and Nancy, in thin summer frocks, putting the finishing touches to the attractive meal about to be served there.
Up in a window of the house next door, behind closed blinds, an elderly neighbour had watched Jane wreathing a big glass bowl full of strawberries with a crisp little green vine spray.
"The Bells certainly are the queerest people anybody ever lived neighbour to," she said over her shoulder to her sister, a withered little spinster, who, in this hot, small upstairs room, was sewing at another window, which did not look out upon the garden, and therefore could have its blinds open. "Anybody 'd think life was just one picnic to them. Think of lugging all those dishes outdoors this hot night, and then lugging 'em all in again--and they all dressed out in flowered muslins!"
The sister came to the window and peered somewhat wistfully out through the closed blinds. "It does look sort of pleasant out there," she said. "And we certainly can't say they 're not good neighbours. Mrs. Bell sent over a whole tin of those light rolls of hers this morning. They 'll come in handy for supper."
"There come the men." Mrs. Hunter brought her gaze to bear upon the four who had stolen up to the gate, and who, as she spoke, burst out suddenly with a crisp clapping of hands which brought the three in the "flowered-muslins" to the right-about. If Mrs. Hunter and Miss Maria, watching those four advance, could have heard what they were saying as they caught sight of the flower-decked table, they might have had a new light shed upon the question whether the trouble of bringing forth all those dishes from the house had been worth while.