“No, you fool,” I said to myself. “This is your house. You are going to live in it. If you can’t plan it yourself, you’d better go back to teaching.”
I returned to the dial and went to work again. She had suggested a ring of low flowers, and some taller ones, irregularly set. I measured off a six-foot circle about the pedestal, as the inner ring of the beds, and left four breaks in it, to the four cardinal points of the compass, where the turf or paths could come in to the dial. Then I extended the sides of these four beds on the straight axes of the paths for three feet, and made the rear sides not on the regular arc of the inner edges, but full of irregularities, almost of bulges, where I would set clumps of tall flowers. “She’ll like that, I guess,” I reflected, and then caught myself at it, and grinned rather sheepishly.
I rose and went to the barn for a load of manure. The great pile which had been there when I bought the place was already used up, but I secured enough litter with a rake to cover the beds and brought it back. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late to spade it under, so I went into the house to see if the painters were getting the colour right. They were, or as nearly right as it seems to be humanly possible for house painters to do, and I plodded up the road to dinner. As I passed my potato field, I saw rows of green shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure, sitting in the shadow on the stone wall.
I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles of potatoes toward her.
“It is time for dinner,” I said meekly.
She looked up. “Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk.”
“What was he saying?” I asked.
“Things you wouldn’t understand,” said she.
“About words in ’hy’?”
She shook her head. “Not at all; nothing quite so stupid–but nearly as saddening.” She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine, enigmatically wistful.