“I couldn’t have heaven without you, Molly darling,” she said, putting her glowing head down beside Mary’s brown one on the pillow. “It wouldn’t be that, you know, if I saw you poking about the old garden beds down here without me. When are you coming out into the garden again, old Niceness?”
“Soon, I think,” said Mary. “I don’t intend to be long getting back my strength.”
Mary was as good as her word. Now that her painful wounds had begun to heal, her sound young flesh went on rapidly with its task of restoration. In two days less than two weeks Mary was dressed in a beautiful new gown, all white and blue and soft-falling drapery, which her mother had sent for, that she might come forth in it as an outer symbol of her recovery.
Mr. and Mrs. Moulton, with Mark, were there in the garden to receive Mary, each with a little welcoming gift for the girl who was the heart of the Garden place, house, garden, and household. Mark’s gift was fringed gentians for which he had scoured the hills beyond Vineclad, rising before the sun to gather the rare and beautiful blossoms. Mark murmured as he handed them to Mary, “They were as blue as her eyes, and very like her.”
The rain that had associated itself with Mary’s recovery in the minds of those who loved her had been followed by successive downfalls. The drought once broken, the earth received refreshment constantly. The garden was beautiful with the more gorgeous bloom of September. Salvia blazed above dark-red cannas; the hedge of hollyhocks at the end of the longest garden vista shone like the mint; cosmos delicately triumphed in its last act of the summer pageant. Through it all came the persistent fragrance of alyssum and mignonette, faithful to the end, not to be dismayed that, after their long summer sweetness, tall and showy flowers overtopped them.
“How lovely it all is after the rain! And after the fire!” said Mary, with a little laugh that caught in her throat. “I’m so glad to come back to you, dear old garden!”
“It is just as glad to get you back, daughter,” said Mr. Moulton, springing to forestall Win and Mark, and to help Mary into the lounging chair prepared for her. “The garden called us all together to tell you so, though it seems to me to need no spokesman.”
“It never needed one, though it adds to it! But how it speaks! I think it is fairly shouting, in reds and yellows and whites and purples: ‘The old Garden garden is glad to see you, Mary. It can’t quite spare one of its girls!’” said Mary, settling down with a sigh of utter content into her great chair and into the great love all things, animate and inanimate, around her bore her.