Poor old Goody Parsons, dead so many years and gone to that Heaven that was to be like Hertfordshire, how she would have rejoiced to know that her memory still lived and had offered back the gift that Master Simon had given.
Most joyfully did Clotilde accept what the boy had brought and together they went quickly to find the very place where the former plants had grown. They set the rose below the easement window of the drawing-room and the hawthorn bush close to the edge of the Queen’s garden.
“Now,” exclaimed Clotilde, “though all the rest be only mine, I can feel that part of the garden at least still belongs to those who planted it.”
Giles Thurston was not the only one, however, who had an offering to bring. Nearly every day some woman would present her with a bag of seeds, saying:
“These are of the pink and white hollyhocks that have flourished in our dooryard ever since Mistress Margeret Bardwell gave my grandmother the first plants.”
“I have carried hither a clump of sweet-william that perhaps you may like to have. It is a matter of pride with us that Master Simon himself gave the first plants to one of our family. They say he brought them from England.”
So it went on, Stephen’s flowers, Alisoun’s, Margeret’s and Master Simon’s all were to be found growing somewhere, so many had been the gifts and so grateful the friends who had received them. Fraxinella, wallflowers, peonies and fair maids of France, all were there to grow anew in memory of the brave old Puritan and his children. Clotilde dropped a few tears as she set out the fair maids of France. What a long, long time it was since Stephen had found her sitting beside the bed to sing to them, how swift the years had been and how happy until so little a time ago!
The most wonderful gift of all came at the very end of the replanting. It was brought by the minister of Hopewell, who since the very beginning of the war had been away and had only just now come home again. What he gave her was a little bag of gold and an old, torn yellow letter.
“These were left in my hands,” he explained to Clotilde, “by the pastor before me, who had received them in turn from the man who came before him. It was only as I was on my way home that I heard full news of the burning of the garden and realised that the assistant that I had left here did not know that the letter had to do with just such a disaster. Indeed, so old is the trust that I had well-nigh forgotten it myself.”