“Good-bye, Samuel. If it hadn’t been for the basket—.” She paused, slowly withdrawing her hand, and then went on again: “You’re makin’ an awful mistake. Who’d a thought it of a man o’ your age! I shall never forget you. Good-bye, Samuel.”
With one swift, half hungering, half frightened glance at the basket, she slipped out of the room. Samuel did not laugh and his eyes did not twinkle as he went up to the matron’s desk.
“Miss Jessica, they’ve all practically refused me. What shall I do?” He had a vision of an endless quest of an eligible, willing old lady from an old folks’ home.
Miss Jessica thought a long while, biting the end of her pencil, and at last she said slowly, half reluctantly:
“There is one more—who—answers your requirements, but she was too proud to enter the lists.”
Samuel’s face lit up. Proud women can be very tender and only a tender soul could accept the basket. Moreover, a woman with sufficient spirit to resent his action today was a woman after his own heart. He lifted his head from its sidewise slant and, throwing back his shoulders, looked Jessica square in the eyes:
“What’s the woman’s name?”
“Miss Ellie Smith.”
“Waal, I be goin’ ter change it!” vowed Mr. Jessup. “Whar be she?”
The matron hesitated, wondering whether she could play the part of the traitor to dignified, self-reliant Miss Ellie, but Jessica was very young. She looked down the long years that these two had traveled, and seeing how dusty and stony and hard the road had been, wondered why they should not come into a restful, fragrant garden at last. Ellie, she knew, even yet, with the help of the right man, could make the garden. And now as she looked keenly into Samuel Jessup’s eyes—eyes shaded by iron-gray brows, but deep, dark brown eyes, limpid, sparkling, full of tenderness and an appealing hunger for tenderness—she felt that Samuel could play an all-sufficient Adam to Ellie’s Eve, in the garden.