She was a pretty, fair English girl, fresh as a rose in her dainty pink muslin dress, flounced as they wore them in the mutiny year--in three full flounces to the waist, like the corolla of a flower. And the lace sunshade she held tilted over her shoulder as a protection against the slanting rays of the afternoon sun added to her rose-likeness by its calyx of pale green lining. "Ought we?" said the young Englishman who walked beside her, his hand clasping hers. They were a good-looking pair, pleasant to behold. "What a bore; it is so jolly here." The epithet was not happy, save as an expression of the speaker's frame of mind. For the garden into which these engaged lovers had wandered away from the gay party of English men and women who had taken possession of the marble summer-house in its centre for a picnic, or, as the natives call it, "a fool's dinner," was something more than jolly. It was beautiful, this garden of a dead dynasty of kings past and gone like last year's roses. But there were roses and to spare still within its high four-square walls that were hidden from each other by the burnished orange-groves, by the tall forest trees fringing its cross of wide marble aqueducts bordered by wide paths. Such blossoming trees! The _kachnar_ flinging its bare branches, set thick with its geranium flowers, against the creamy feathers waving among the dense dark foliage of the _mangoes_, the _bakayun_ drooping its long lilac tassels beside the great gold ones of the _umultâs_, and here and there its whole vitality lavished on a monstrous leaf or two, a huge flower or two, white, curved, solid, as if cut in cold marble, yet with a warm fragrance at its heart, a hill magnolia challenged the scent of the roses below. Ineffectually, at least here in this square of the garden; for that cross of wide, empty aqueducts divided it into squares. And this one was a square of roses--roses everywhere, even in the lower level of what in the old kingly days had been a marble-edged water-way, which now, half filled with soil, held more roses. But they were all of one kind--the pink Persian rose, whose outer petals pale in the sunlight, whose rose of roses heart is full of an almost piercing perfume. What wonder, when it is the otto of roses rose! It grew here for that set purpose in orderly lines, its grey green, velvety leaves almost hidden by its profusion of flowers. And the scent of them filled the whole square of garden, where the air, still warm from the past noon, lay prisoned in that fringe of blossoming trees. It seemed to fill the brain, also, with the quintessence of gladness, beauty, life, and love. So His arm sought Her waist and their eyes met. But only for a second; the next, Her blush matching Her flounces, She had drawn back, and He with an angry frown was glaring in the direction of the voice which had interrupted them.