So they settled down in the little tavern, and while Eben took excursions round about to place his "trade," she stayed behind, and either shut herself upstairs or sat meditatively in the garden. What moved her now was an overwhelming curiosity. She wondered what the first wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in his helplessness, used to go through his pockets. "Anybody can bear 'most anything," he used to declare, as he steadied himself by the gate, in drunken majesty, and addressed the school-children in a ring, "but goin' through anybody's pockets. That's more'n anybody ought to be called upon to bear." Lydia smiled sorrowfully upon herself in the midst of her daze, at the wonder whether she also should be tempted to go through her husband's pockets, not thriftily, to save his purse, but to discover the portrait of his first wife. Yet she had resolved to ask him nothing; and then, in the way of womankind, she opened her lips one day and said the thing she would not. They were sitting in the garden under the pear tree, with beautiful old borders, all a lovely neglect, on both sides. Lydia had been talking about flowers, and getting up now and then to pull a weed,--an ineffectual service where weeds were so plentiful,--and stopping to speak a word to a late sweet-william, as if it were a child. Eben was smoking his pipe contentedly and watching her. "You like 'em, don't you?" he said fondly, as she came back and took her chair again. "I guess I do," said Lydia. That day she felt particularly well and freed from the assaults of memory. The sun was on her face and she welcomed it, and a light breeze stirred her hair. "Mother always said I was bewitched over gardens." "You shall have all the land you can take care of," he avowed, "an' you shall have a hired man of your own. I can foretell his name. It's Eben Jakes." Lydia laughed, and he went on: "We used to have a few beds, but when mother was taken away I kinder let it slip." Suddenly Lydia felt her heart beating hard. Something choked her, and her voice stuck in her throat. "Eben, how'd your mother look?" "What say?" asked Eben. He was shaking the ashes from his pipe, and the tapping of the bowl against his chair had drowned her mild attempt. "How did your mother look?" He pursed his lips and gazed off into the distance of the orchard. Then he laughed a little at his own incompetence. "I dunno 's I can tell. I ain't much of a hand at that. She was just kinder old an' pindlin' to other folks. But she looked pretty nice to me." "Ain't you got a photograph of her here with you?" He shook his head. "I thought mebbe you'd carry one round."