“How be you to-day?” the guest asked kindly, as she entered the kitchen. “Why, what a sight o’ flowers, Mis’ Bickford! What be you goin’ to do with ’em all?” Mrs. Bickford wore a grave expression as she glanced over her spectacles. “My sister’s boy fetched ’em over,” she answered. “You know my sister Parsons’s a great hand to raise flowers, an’ this boy takes after her. He said his mother thought the gardin never looked handsomer, and she picked me these to send over. They was sendin’ a team to Westbury for some fertilizer to put on the land, an’ he come with the men, an’ stopped to eat his dinner ’long o’ me. He’s been growin’ fast, and looks peakëd. I expect sister ’Liza thought the ride, this pleasant day, would do him good. ’Liza sent word for me to come over and pass some days next week, but it ain’t so that I can.” “Why, it ’s a pretty time of year to go off and make a little visit,” suggested the neighbor encouragingly. “I ain’t got my sitting-room chamber carpet taken up yet,” sighed Mrs. Bickford. “I do feel condemned. I might have done it to-day, but ’twas all at end when I saw Tommy coming. There, he’s a likely boy, an’ so relished his dinner; I happened to be well prepared. I don’t know but he’s my favorite o’ that family. Only I’ve been sittin’ here thinkin’, since he went, an’ I can’t remember that I ever was so belated with my spring cleaning.” “’Twas owin’ to the weather,” explained Miss Pendexter. “None of us could be so smart as common this year, not even the lazy ones that always get one room done the first o’ March, and brag of it to others’ shame, and then never let on when they do the rest.” The two women laughed together cheerfully. Mrs. Bickford had put up the wide leaf of her large table between the windows and spread out the flowers. She was sorting them slowly into three heaps. “Why, I do declare if you haven’t got a rose in bloom yourself!” exclaimed Miss Pendexter abruptly, as if the bud had not been announced weeks before, and its progress regularly commented upon. “Ain’t it a lovely rose? Why, Mis’ Bickford!” “Yes’m, it’s out to-day,” said Mrs. Bickford, with a somewhat plaintive air. “I’m glad you come in so as to see it.” The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway. Miss Pendexter forgot herself and her hostess and the tangled mass of garden flowers in looking at the red rose. She even forgot that it was incumbent upon her to carry forward the conversation. Mrs. Bickford was subject to fits of untimely silence which made her friends anxiously sweep the corners of their minds in search of something to say, but any one who looked at her now could easily see that it was not poverty of thought that made her speechless, but an overburdening sense of the inexpressible.