Nor I didn't mean times when she'd be out in the garden during the day, and the telephone bell would ring, and she would throw things and head for the house, running, because she thought it might be him calling her up from the city. Most usually it was. I always knew it had been him when she came back singing. And then there were the late afternoons, say, almost an hour before the first train that he could possibly come on and that now and then he caught. Always before it was time for that she would open her front door that she'd had closed all day to keep her house cool, and she'd bring her book or her sewing out on the porch, and never pay a bit of attention to either, because she sat looking up the street. There was only a little bit of shade on her porch that time in the afternoon, and I used to want to ask her to come over on my cool, shady side porch, but I had the sense not to. I sort of understood how she liked to sit out there where she was, on their own porch, waiting for him. Then he'd come, and she'd sit out in the garden and read to him while he dug in the beds, or she'd sew on the porch while he cut the grass--well, now, it don't sound like much as I tell it, does it?--and yet it used to look wonderful sweet to me, looking across the street. But as I said, it wasn't any of these times, nor yet the long summer evenings when I could just see the glimmer of her white dress on the porch or in the garden, or their shadows on the curtain, rainy evenings; no, it wasn't these times that made me wish for everybody in the world that they lived next door to a bride and groom. But the thing I mean came to me all of a sudden, when they hadn't been my neighbors for a week. And it came to me like this: One night I'd had them over for supper. It had been a hot day, and ordinarily I'm opposed to company on a hot day; but some way having _them_ was different. And then I didn't imagine she was so very used to cooking, and I got to thinking maybe a meal away from home would be a rest. And after supper we'd been walking around my yard, looking at my late cosmos and wondering whether it would get around to bloom before the frost. And they had been telling me how they meant to plant their garden when they got one of their own. I liked to keep them talking about it, because his face lit up so young and boyish, and hers got all soft and bright; and they looked at each other like they could see that garden planted and up and growing and pretty near paid for. So I kept egging them on, asking this and that, just to hear them plan. "One whole side of the wall," said he, "we'll have lilacs and forsythia." She looked at him. "I thought we said hollyhocks there," she said. "Well, don't you remember," he said, "we changed that when you said you'd planned, ever since you were a little girl to have lilacs and forsythia on the edge of your garden?" "Well--so I did," she remembered. "But I thought you said you liked hollyhocks best?"