As the sun strengthened in the sky Gainah grew more silent than ever. Spring was here, summer on the way, and she had nothing to do. Pamela had taken the keys. The maids went to her for orders. She paid them their wages and gave them each an evening out during the week--an indulgence which until her coming had never been dreamt of. Nothing to do! Not wanted! In her idle hours Gainah wandered over the rambling house alone, going from room to room, touching things without meaning, taking up and putting down; mumbling vaguely to herself. One morning she put on her shabby cloth cap--an old one of Jethro’s--and went into the garden. It was raining--a soft, warm rain, with the sun behind it. “Good growing weather,” she said to herself with satisfaction--and then remembered that the garden had been taken from her. Winter storms had made the borders draggled in spite of Daborn’s labor and Pamela’s enthusiasm. Gainah felt, in a fumbling, wordless way, that this garden was like the devastation of her own life. She carried a little fork; force of habit had made her get it from the tool-shed. Now and then, again from habit, she bent her stiff back to dig out a weed; but there were no weeds. The stalks of the Michaelmas daisies had been left--by Pamela’s orders, so that the frost might not get down to the roots. Gainah viewed the stiff clumps of brown wood with injury; _her_ rule had been to cut down everything in November. She remembered that she had promised a bit of white daisy to Chalcraft’s “missus” in exchange for a deep purple one with a golden eye--her generosity took the form of barter. She went round and round in the spraying rain. There was no wind, simply a feeling of soft, patient dampness and melancholy in the garden. Over the wall was the sodden, empty road, and on the horizon the streaming, formless hills. Her eyes spied out a few self-sown hardy plants in the neatly-raked beds. She dropped little fragments of criticism as she went. “The slugs have been at the ‘reckless’ plants,” she murmured regretfully, stooping to look more closely at a clump of sickly auricula, which seemed mostly thick stalk. “There’s a Glory in bud already. I remember old Jethro budding the brier. He was a good hand at budding, and it was a wet season, with the sap running well, that year. Ah! the Glory Die! John makes a fine head on a standard.” She touched the yellow bud--a little pinched and small--with tender fingers. A faint touch of red rushed into her white face. “That green Yule when she was taken,”--she was thinking of Jethro’s mother--“I picked a Glory full out on Christmas morning, and kept it in water for more ’n a week. The hard frost came soon after--the hardest for forty years. The old sow was frozen stiff in the sty, and Joan Wadey’s boy was out digging swedes for old Farmer Scotter, and he set down and his breeches turned into ice and burned into his flesh. I mind that--and the Glory blooming on the shelf.”