Mr. Dillwyn, as I said, did not come near Shampuashuh.  He took his indemnification in sending all sorts of pleasant things.  Papers and magazines overflowed, flowed over into Mrs. Marx’s hands, and made her life rich; flowed over again into Mr. Hotchkiss’s hands, and embroidered his life for him.  Mr. Dillwyn sent fruit; foreign fruit, strange and delicious, which it was a sort of education even to eat, bringing one nearer to the countries so far and unknown, where it grew.  He sent music; and if some of it passed under Lois’s ban as “nonsense,” that was not the case with the greater part.  “She has a marvellous true appreciation of what is fine,” Mrs. Barclay wrote; “and she rejects with an accuracy which surprises me, all that is merely pretty and flashy.  There are some bits of Handel that have great power over the girl; she listens to them, I might almost say, devoutly, and is never weary.  Madge is delighted with Rossini; but Lois gives her adherence to the German classics, and when I play Haydn or Mozart or Mendelssohn, stands rapt in her delighted listening, and looking like ­well, I will not tantalize you by trying to describe to you what I see every day.  I marvel only where the girl got these tastes and susceptibilities; it must be blood; I believe in inheritance.  She has had until now no training or experience; but your bird is growing her wings fast now, Philip.  If you can manage to cage her!  Natures hereabout are not tame, by any means.”

Mr. Dillwyn, I believe I mentioned, sent engravings and exquisite photographs; and these almost rivalled Haydn and Mozart in Lois’s mind.  For various reasons, Mrs. Barclay sought to make at least this source of pleasure common to the whole family; and would often invite them all into her room, or carry her portfolio out into their general sitting-room, and display to the eyes of them all the views of foreign lands; cities, castles and ruins, palaces and temples, Swiss mountains and Scotch lochs, Paris Boulevards and Venetian canals, together with remains of ancient art and works of modern artists; of all which Philip sent an unbounded number and variety.  These evenings were unendingly curious to Mrs. Barclay.  Comment was free, and undoubtedly original, whatever else might be said of it; and character, and the habit of life of her audience, were unconsciously revealed to her.  Intense curiosity and eagerness for information were observable in them all; but tastes, and the power of apprehension and receptiveness towards new and strange ideas, and the judgment passed upon things, were very different in the different members of the group.  These exhibitions had further one good effect, not unintended by the exhibitor; they brought the whole family somewhat in tone with the new life to which two of its members were rising.  It was not desirable that Lois should be too far in advance of her people, or rather that they should be too far behind her.  The questions propounded to Mrs. Barclay on these occasions, and the élucidations she found it desirable to give without questions, transformed her part into that of a lecturer; and the end of such an evening would find her tired with her exertions, yet well repaid for them.  The old grandmother manifested great curiosity, great admiration, with frequently an expression of doubt or disapproval; and very often a strange, slight, inexpressible air of one who felt herself to belong to a different world, to which all these things were more or less foreign.  Charity showed also intense eagerness and curiosity, and inquisitiveness; and mingled with those, a very perceptible flavour of incredulity or of disdain, the latter possibly born of envy.  But Lois and Madge were growing with every journey to distant lands, and every new introduction to the great works of men’s hands, of every kind and of every age.

After receiving that letter of Mrs. Barclay’s mentioned in the last chapter, Philip Dillwyn would immediately have attacked Tom Caruthers again on the question of his liking for Miss Lothrop, to find out whether possibly there were any the least foundation for Mrs. Barclay’s scruples and fears.  But it was no longer in his power.  The Caruthers family had altered their plans; and instead of going abroad in the spring, had taken their departure with the first of December, after an impromptu wedding of Julia to her betrothed.  Mr. Dillwyn did not seriously believe that there was anything his plan had to fear from this side; nevertheless he preferred not to move in the dark; and he waited.  Besides, he must allow time for the work he had sent Mrs. Barclay to do; to hurry matters would be to spoil everything; and it was much better on every ground that he should keep away from Shampuashuh.  As I said, he busied himself with Shampuashuh affairs all he could, and wore out the winter as he best might; which was not very satisfactorily.  And when spring came he resolutely carried out his purpose, and sailed for Europe.  Till at least a year had gone by he would not try to see Lois; Mrs. Barclay should have a year at least to push her beneficent influence and bring her educational efforts to some visible result; he would keep away; but it would be much easier to keep away if the ocean lay between them, and he went to Florence and northern Italy and the Adriatic.

Meanwhile the winter had “flown on soft wings” at Shampuashuh.  Every day seemed to be growing fuller and richer than its predecessors; every day Lois and Madge were more eager in the search after knowledge, and more ready for the reception of it.  A change was going on in them, so swift that Mrs. Barclay could almost see it from day to day.  Whether others saw it I cannot tell; but Mrs. Marx shook her head in the fear of it, and Charity opined that the family “might whistle for a garden, and for butter and cheese next summer.”  Precious opportunity of winter days, when no gardening nor dairy work was possible! and blessed long nights and mornings, after sunset and before sunrise, when no housework of any sort put in claims upon the leisure of the two girls.  There were no interruptions from without.  In Shampuashuh, society could not be said to flourish.  Beyond an occasional “sewing society” meeting, and a much more rare gathering for purely social purposes, nothing more than a stray caller now and then broke the rich quiet of those winter days; the time for a tillage, and a sowing, and a growth far beyond in preciousness all “the precious things put forth by the sun” in the more genial time of the year.  But days began to become longer, nevertheless, as the weeks went on; and daylight was pushing those happy mornings and evenings into lesser and lesser compass; and snow quite disappeared from the fields, and buds began to swell on the trees and take colour, and airs grew more gentle in temperature; though I am bound to say there is a sharpness sometimes in the nature of a Shampuashuh spring, that quite outdoes all the greater rigours of the winter that has gone.

“The frost is out of the ground!” said Lois one day to her friend.

“Well,” said Mrs. Barclay innocently; “I suppose that is a good thing.”

Lois went on with her drawing, and made no answer.

But soon Mrs. Barclay began to perceive that less reading and studying were done; or else some drawing lingered on its way towards completion; and the deficits became more and more striking.  At last she demanded the reason.

“O,” said Madge, “the cows have come in, and I have a good deal to do in the dairy now; it takes up all my mornings.  I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do! but the milk must be seen to, and the butter churned, and then worked over; and it takes time, Mrs. Barclay.”

“And Lois?”

“O, Lois is making garden.”

“Making garden!”

“Yes; O, she always does it.  It’s her particular part of the business.  We all do a little of everything; but the garden is Lois’s special province, and the dairy mine, and Charity takes the cooking and the sewing.  O, we all do our own sewing, and we all do grandmother’s sewing; only Charity takes head in that department.”

“What does Lois do in the garden?”

“O, everything.  We get somebody to plough it up in the fall; and in the spring we have it dug over; but all the rest she does.  We have a good garden too,” said Madge, smiling.

“And these things take your morning and her morning?”

“Yes, indeed; I should think they did.  Rather!”

Mrs. Barclay held her peace then, and for some time afterwards.  The spring came on, the days became soft and lovely, after March had blown itself out; the trees began to put forth leaves, the blue-birds were darting about, like skyey messengers; robins were whistling, and daffodils were bursting, and grass was green.  One lovely warm morning, when everything without seemed beckoning to her, Mrs. Barclay threw on a shawl and hat, and made her way out to the old garden, which up to this day she had never entered.

She found the great wide enclosure looking empty and bare enough.  The two or three old apple trees hung protectingly over the wooden bench in the middle, their branches making pretty tracery against the tender, clear blue of the sky; but no shade was there.  The branches only showed a little token of swelling and bursting buds, which indeed softened in a lovely manner the lines of their interlacing network, and promised a plenty of green shadow by and by.  No shadow was needed at present, for the sun was too gentle; its warmth was welcome, and beneficent, and kindly.  The old cherry tree in the corner was beginning to open its wealth of white blossoms; everywhere else the bareness and brownness of winter was still reigning, only excepting the patches of green turf around the boles and under the spreading boughs of the trees here and there.  The garden was no garden, only a spread of soft, up-turned brown loam.  It looked a desolate place to Mrs. Barclay.

In the midst of it, the one point of life and movement was Lois.  She was in a coarse, stout stuff dress, short, and tucked up besides, to keep it out of the dirt.  Her hands were covered with coarse, thick gloves, her head with a little old straw hat.  At the moment Mrs. Barclay came up, she was raking a patch of ground which she had carefully marked out, and bounded with a trampled footway; she was bringing it with her rake into a condition of beautiful level smoothness, handling her tool with light dexterity.  As Mrs. Barclay came near, she looked up with a flash of surprise and a smile.

“I have found you,” said the lady.  “So this is what you are about!”

“It is what I am always about at this time of year.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just here I am going to put in radishes and lettuce.”

“Radishes and lettuce!  And that is instead of French and philosophy!”

“This is philosophy,” said Lois, while with a neat movement of her rake she threw off some stones which she had collected from the surface of the bed.  “Very good philosophy.  Surely the philosophy of life is first ­to live.”

Mrs. Barclay was silent a moment upon this.

“Are radishes and lettuce the first thing you plant in the spring, then?”

“O dear, no!” said Lois.  “Do you see all that corner? that’s in potatoes.  Do you see those slightly marked lines ­here, running across from the walk to the wall? ­peas are there.  They’ll be up soon.  I think I shall put in some corn to-morrow.  Yonder is a bed of radishes and lettuce just out of the ground.  We’ll have some radishes for tea, before you know it.”

“And do you mean to say that you have been planting potatoes? you?”

“Yes,” said Lois, looking at her and laughing.  “I like to plant potatoes.  In fact, I like to plant anything.  What I do not always like so well, is the taking care of them after they are up and growing.”

Mrs. Barclay sat down and watched her.  Lois was now tracing delicate little drills across the breadth of her nicely-prepared bed; little drills all alike, just so deep and just so far apart.  Then she went to a basket hard by for a little paper of seeds; two papers; and began deftly to scatter the seed along the drills, with delicate and careful but quick fingers.  Mrs. Barclay watched her till she had filled all the rows, and began to cover the seeds in; that, too, she did quick and skilfully.

“That is not fit work for you to do, Lois.”

“Why not?”

“You have something better to do.”

“I do not see how I can.  This is the work that is given me.”

“But any common person could do that?”

“We have not got the common person to do it,” said Lois, laughing; “so it comes upon an uncommon one.”

“But there is a fitness in things.”

“So you will think, when you get some of my young lettuce.”  The drills were fast covered in, but there were a good many of them, and Lois went on talking and working with equal spirit.

“I do not think I shall ­” Mrs. Barclay answered the last statement.

“I like to do this, Mrs. Barclay.  I like to do it very much.  I am pulled a little two ways this spring ­but that only shows this is good for me.”

“How so?”

“When anybody is living to his own pleasure, I guess he is not in the best way of improvement.”

“Is there no one but you to do all the weeding, by and by, when the garden will be full of plants?”

“Nobody else,” said Lois.

“That must take a great deal of your time!”

“Yes,” said Lois, “it does; that and the fruit-picking.”

“Fruit-picking!  Mercy!  Why, child, must you do all that?”

“It is my part,” said Lois pleasantly.  “Charity and Madge have each their part.  This is mine, and I like it better than theirs.  But it is only so, Mrs. Barclay, that we are able to get along.  A gardener would eat up our garden.  I take only my share.  And there is a great deal of pleasure in it.  It is pleasant to provide for the family’s wants, and to see the others enjoy what I bring in; ­yes, and to enjoy it myself.  And then, do you see how pleasant the work is!  Don’t you like it out here this morning?”

Mrs. Barclay cast a glance around her again.  There was a slight spring haze in the air, which seemed to catch and hold the sun’s rays and diffuse them in gentle beneficence.  Through it the opening cherry blossoms gave their tender promise; the brown, bare apple trees were softened; an indescribable breath of hope and life was in the air, to which the birds were doing all they could to give expression; there was a delicate joy in Nature’s face, as if at being released from the bands of Winter and having her hands free again.  The smell of the upturned earth came fresh to Mrs. Barclay’s nostrils, along with a salt savour from the not distant sea.  Yes, it was pleasant, with a rare and wonderful pleasantness; and yet Mrs. Barclay’s eyes came discontentedly back to Lois.

“It would be possible to enjoy all this, Lois, if you were not doing such evil work.”

“Evil work!  O no, Mrs. Barclay.  The work that the Lord gives anybody to do cannot be evil.  It must be the very best thing he can do.  And I do not believe I should enjoy the spring ­and the summer ­and the autumn ­near so well, if I were not doing it.”

“Must one be a gardener, to have such enjoyment?”

“I must,” said Lois, laughing.  “If I do not follow my work, my work follows me; and then it comes like a taskmaster, and carries a whip.”

“But, Lois! that sort of work will make your hands rough.”

Lois lifted one of her hands in its thick glove, and looked at it.  “Well,” she said, “what then?  What are hands made for?”

“You know very well what I mean.  You know a time may come when you would like to have your hands white and delicate.”

“The time is come now,” said Lois, laughing.  “I have not to wait for it.  I like white hands, and delicate hands, as well as anybody.  Mine must do their work, all the same.  Something might be said for my feet, too, I suppose,” she added, with another laugh.

At the moment she had finished outlining an other bed, and was now trampling a little hard border pathway round it, making the length of her foot the breadth of the pathway, and setting foot to foot close together, so bit by bit stamping it round.  Mrs. Barclay looked on, and wished some body else could have looked on, at the bright, fresh face under the little old hat, and the free action and spirit and accuracy with which everything that either feet or hands did was done.  Somehow she forgot the coarse dress, and only saw the delicate creature in it.

“Lois, I do not like it!” she began again.  “Do you know, some people are very particular about these little things ­fastidious about them.  You may one day yet want to please one of those very men.”

“Not unless he wants to please me first!” said Lois, with a glance from her path-treading.

“Of course.  I am supposing that.”

“I don’t know him!” said Lois.  “And I don’t see him in the distance!”

“That proves nothing.”

“And it wouldn’t make any difference if I did.”

“You are mistaken in thinking that.  You do not know yet what it is to be in love, Lois.”

“I don’t know,” said Lois.  “Can’t one be in love with one’s grandmother?”

“But, Lois, this is going to take a great deal of your time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you want all your time, to give to more important things.  I can’t bear to have you drop them all to plant potatoes.  Could not somebody else be found to do it?”

“We could not afford the somebody, Mrs. Barclay.”

It was not doubtfully or regretfully that the girl spoke; the brisk content of her answers drove Mrs. Barclay almost to despair.

“Lois, you owe something to yourself.”

“What, Mrs. Barclay?”

“You owe it to yourself to be prepared for what I am sure is coming to you.  You are not made to live in Shampuashuh all your life.  Somebody will want you to quit it and go out into the wide world with him.”

Lois was silent a few minutes, with her colour a little heightened, fresh as it had been already; then, having tramped all round her new bed, she came up to where Mrs. Barclay and her basket of seeds were.

“I don’t believe it at all,” she said.  “I think I shall live and die here.”

“Do you feel satisfied with that prospect?”

Lois turned over the bags of seeds in her basket, a little hurriedly; then she stopped and looked up at her questioner.

“I have nothing to do with all that,” she said.  “I do not want to think of it.  I have enough in hand to think of.  And I am satisfied, Mrs. Barclay, with whatever God gives me.”  She turned to her basket of seeds again, searching for a particular paper.

“I never heard any one say that before,” remarked the other lady.

“As long as I can say it, don’t you see that is enough?” said Lois lightly.  “I enjoy all this work, besides; and so will you by and by when you get the lettuce and radishes, and some of my Tom Thumb peas.  And I am not going to stop my studies either.”

She went back to the new bed now, where she presently was very busy putting more seeds in.  Mrs. Barclay watched her a while.  Then, seeing a small smile break on the lips of the gardener, she asked Lois what she was thinking of?  Lois looked up.

“I was thinking of that geode you showed us last night.”

“That geode!”

“Yes, it is so lovely.  I have thought of it a great many times.  I am wanting very much to learn about stones now.  I thought always till now that stones were only stones.  The whole world is changed to me since you have come, Mrs. Barclay.”

Yes, thought that lady to herself, and what will be the end of it?

“To tell the truth,” Lois went on, “the garden work comes harder to me this spring than ever it did before; but that shows it is good for me.  I have been having too much pleasure all winter.”

“Can one have too much pleasure?” said Mrs. Barclay discontentedly.

“If it makes one unready for duty,” said Lois.