“The garden is dead,” said she. “Last night I watered the roses with boiling water and salt, and I pulled the other flowers up by their roots. The garden is dead, and I have lost all Cousin Evelina's money, and it need not come between us any longer.” She said that, and looked up in his face with her blue eyes, through which the love of the whole race of loving women from which she had sprung, as well as her own, seemed to look, and held out her little hands; but even then Thomas Merriam could not understand, and stood looking at her.
“Why—did you do it?” he stammered.
“Because you would have me no other way, and—I couldn't bear that anything like that should come between us,” she said, and her voice shook like a harp-string, and her pale face went red, then pale again.
But Thomas still stood staring at her. Then her heart failed her. She thought that he did not care, and she had been mistaken. She felt as if it were the hour of her death, and turned to go. And then he caught her in his arms.
“Oh,” he cried, with a great sob, “the Lord make me worthy of thee, Evelina!”
There had never been so much excitement in the village as when the fact of the ruined garden came to light. Flora Loomis, peeping through the hedge on her way to the store, had spied it first. Then she had run home for her mother, who had in turn sought Lawyer Lang, panting bonnetless down the road. But before the lawyer had started for the scene of disaster, the minister, Thomas Merriam, had appeared, and asked for a word in private with him. Nobody ever knew just what that word was, but the lawyer was singularly uncommunicative and reticent as to the ruined garden.
“Do you think the young woman is out of her mind?” one of the deacons asked him, in a whisper.
“I wish all the young women were as much in their minds; we'd have a better world,” said the lawyer, gruffly.
“When do you think we can begin to move in here?” asked Mrs. Martha Loomis, her wide skirts sweeping a bed of uprooted verbenas.
“When your claim is established,” returned the lawyer, shortly, and turned on his heel and went away, his dry old face scanning the ground like a dog on a scent. That afternoon he opened the sealed document in the presence of witnesses, and the name of the heir to whom the property fell was disclosed. It was “Thomas Merriam, the beloved and esteemed minister of this parish,” and young Evelina would gain her wealth instead of losing it by her marriage. And furthermore, after the declaration of the name of the heir was this added: “This do I in the hope and belief that neither the greed of riches nor the fear of them shall prevent that which is good and wise in the sight of the Lord, and with the surety that a love which shall triumph over so much in its way shall endure, and shall be a blessing and not a curse to my beloved cousin, Evelina Leonard.”