I’m trying to figure out the title and author of a short story I read about 40 years ago in a collection of short stories. It was about an old woman who lives alone in Japan? China? I think the old woman is from America. She has a lovely garden but is very upset because some kind of animal is sleeping in her flower beds and ruining her flowers. She hires a night watchman who’s supposed to go around at night making noise to keep the animal away from her garden. She is very demanding and critical of the watchman; she wants things done just so. The old woman feels the night watchman is lazy, etc…She continues to get more and more frustrated and near the end of the story she goes out to see what he’s doing and finds that he is the one who has been sleeping in her flower beds and ruining everything. She runs away screaming and jumps off a cliff (this now sounds very over dramatic, but it seemed to work in the story.) The night watchman later reports that he saw an angel running toward the cliff…
I have a vague memory that the story might have been called “The Angel,” and an even vaguer recollection that the story’s author might have been Pearl Buck — BUT, it was definitely a short story and it WASN’T The Fighting Angel, the novel Buck wrote that was loosely based on her father’s life as a missionary.