Homer stood there, military cap in hand, and wet up to the knees with dew. His love for flowers was a passion, only surpassed by his exquisite tenderness for dumb animals and children. Hetty had said of her _protégé_ that he had the soul of a painter-poet, but that the wires were cut between spirit and speech. He had been on his knees since there was light enough to show the difference between weeds and precious plants, cleaning out the garden borders. “_Now_” (fumbling with his shabby headgear), “I was wishful fer to speak with ye before ennybody else came down. Leastways, Mary Ann, she’s in the kitchen, but don’t count, bein’ busy an’ out of the way.” Hetty smiled languidly. Her eyes were heavy-lidded; her motions slow for her. She had lain all night, staring into the blackness above her, now crying to a deaf heaven to show her a plain path for her feet, now trembling with ecstatic anguish in the recollection of the interview that opened a vista of Eden she yet dared not enter. “Come what may, he has called me darling!” she was thinking for the hundredth time, as the interruption came. “What is it, Homer? Are your flowers all right?” He ventured, after a glance at his feet, to step upon the unbroken breadths of Brussels. “_Now_—I was up a tree in the orchard las’ night. An’ Mr. Gilchris’—the _young_ one—and Mr. Wayt, they were a-talkin’ on the groun’ under the tree——” Hetty wheeled upon him with blazing eyes and cheeks. “You were in the orchard! In what tree? When? But no!” Her excitement subsided as quickly as it had arisen. “You were in the house when I came in. Go on!” She drew a long breath. Homer twiddled his thumbs in the crown of his cap. His speech could never be hurried. If urged to talk fast, he was dumb. “Now, I was up in that big tree where the picter was painted. Mr. Gilchris’—the young Mr. Gilchris’—he war a-lyin’ onto the grass when I came along. ’Twar after you had gone upstairs—nigh onto ten o’clock, I guess, or may be nine—I aint certain. I’d saw the same light, an’, for all them boys ken say, I’ve been saw it many a time——” “Never mind the light.” Hetty said it patiently. “Tell me how you happened to climb the tree.” “Now, Mr. Gilchris’—the young gentleman—he spoke very civil an’ kind to me, an’ we war talkin’ quite a spell, when I heerd Mr. Wayt a-comin’, an’ I clumb the tree so’s he wouldn’t see me, an’ may be go fur me, you know. An’ while I war in the tree I heerd him a-tellin’ Mr. Gilchris’—I meantersay the young Mr. Gilchris’—how he’d sot up ’tell daybreak, four o’clock Sat’day night, a figurin’ onto his sermon what he preached on Sunday——” “Homer!”