“Oh! should you? I can tell you, then. Last year, when I came here, I found a new flower growing in the garden. I don’t know botany, and I don’t know what the flower was, or how it came there; but I suppose the wind brought the seed. My flower was so feeble and withered, that it had lost all beauty and comeliness, and every charm, except a delightful odour. I weeded and worked around it, and watered it regularly, and nursed and cherished it, but it faded faster and faster, yielding a dying fragrance. I said it was too exposed and cold, and I took it up and transplanted it to the conservatory. There it wilted and fell, and I gave it up for lost. But now mark the sequel. A few days after, I took a ride up to the mountain top, and left my horse, for a ramble on foot. A fresh, delicate, delicious odour greeted me. I looked about, and lo! there, in a cleft of the rock on the mountain top, where it would be exposed to all the snow, and wind, and hail of winter, and burning rays of summer, was my strange hothouse plant! There it grew and flourished, swaying to and fro in the wind, and filling all the air with the freshness of its fragrance! Now what do you think I did, Robert? You will laugh at me, of course, for everybody laughed. The very next day I took my poor flower, that was dying in the conservatory—and that I pitied as if it had been a sick, caged bird—and I carried it up the mountain, and planted it in the evening. Thunder gusts and showers the next day prevented my ride; but the third day I visited my protege. It was living! It had plucked up a spirit and intended to live. I am like that plant, Robert! And now, to come back to yourself. We must part, Robert, as friends—kindly—but not to meet again, except as mere acquaintances, until you have outgrown the present weakness of your heart.” She extended her hand—he pressed it to his lips, seized his cap, and hastily left the house. CHAPTER XIII. THE MEETING. “The staring madness, when she wakes, to find That which she has loved—must love—is not that She meant to love— There is a desolation in her eye He cannot bear to look on—for it seems As though it eats the light out of his own.”—_Festus._