If all went well and the Sign of the Fox remained her talisman, who knew but the fund might grow, her father become strong enough to be house man in more than name, Adam might have some education even if Stead returned to work, and she herself could steal a month or two in the dead season?—for the Parkses would be in Washington, and both the Senator and his wife took an interest in her work, not born of desire to patronize. Presently Adam Lawton began to read a little and could move slowly from porch to garden seat, steadied by canes, and attend to many of his wants. Then one glad day Mrs. Fenton had come down in her wheel-chair, and by sheer force of will broke the home-staying spell by coaxing him to drive back to a country boiled dinner with her, saying, “Don’t you remember, Adam, when we were boy and girl together, and I said I’d go to your father’s barn-raising dance with whichever of you boys could lift himself up and touch his chin to the schoolroom door frame, three times? Some boys couldn’t claw, and some got a grip and let go, while some wanted boosting. You were the smallest, yet you got a hold and lifted yourself slowlike, inch by inch, until you got there. That’s the way now, Adam! You’ve had your tumble, and naturally you’ve got to help lift yourself!” Was it what rural folks call a good growing season, or did love and labour brighten and sweeten the simple garden flowers beyond their wont? Who can say? Adam had made some corner brackets for the vine-screened “tea room” porch, which Brooke had covered with tufts of gray moss and coral-capped lichens, and here every day she placed, as well as on the table, quaint stone jugs and lustre pitchers, rescued from the high top shelf of Grandma West’s dresser, filled them with sweet peas, Madonna lilies, mignonette, sweet-william, and clove pinks, and kept long sprays of sweet syringa, lilacs, snowballs, lemon-lilies, foxgloves, larkspur, hollyhocks, according to the season, in an old stone churn raised upon a bench before the kitchen window end to veil it. Not only did the garden yield its best to those who paused for refreshment in passing by, but Brooke’s measure of added liberty, scant though it was, gave her a breathing time to go abroad for flowers of roadside, wood, and the rank river meadows; and while her eyes and hands were busy with the blossoms, her soul drank in the beauty of the scenes beyond, her heart beat strong, and her whole nature seemed to expand and perfect itself in the growth and perfecting of the earth about her. It was on the return from one of these walks through the river meadows, arms laden with blue fleur-de-lis and golden sundrops gathered to the tinkling music of soaring bobolinks, that she met the postman turning up the cross-road from the lower pike, and he begged that she would take the mail, as he had none this afternoon for any other on that branch and his horse was lame.