"I'm sorry if I have come too much," rejoined Putnam bitterly, "but I shall not come much more. I am going away soon. The doctor says I am not getting along fast enough and must have change of air. He has ordered me to the mountains." There was silence for a few minutes. He was looking moodily down at the turf, pulling a blade of grass now and then, biting it and throwing it away. "I thank you very much for your sympathy and kindness," she said at length, rising from her chair; "and I hope you will recover very fast in the mountains. Good-bye." She extended her hand, which Putnam took and held. It was trembling perceptibly. "Wait a moment," he said. "Before I go I should like to show some little mark of respect to your brother's memory. Won't you meet me at the green-house to-morrow morning--say about nine o'clock--and select a few flowers? They will be your flowers, you know--your offering." "Yes," she answered, "I will; and I thank you again for him." The next morning at the appointed hour Putnam descended the steps into the green-house. The gardener had just watered the plants. A rich steam exhaled from the earth and clouded all the glass, and the moist air was heavy with the breath of heliotropes and roses. A number of butterflies were flying about, and at the end of a many-colored perspective of leaves and blossoms Putnam saw Miss Pinckney hovering around a collection of tropical orchids. The gardener had passed on into an adjoining hot-house, and no sound broke the quiet but the dripping of water in a tank of aquatic plants. The fans of the palms and the long fronds of the tree-ferns hung as still as in some painting of an Indian isle. She greeted him with a smile and held out her hand to him. The beauty of the morning and of the place had wrought in her a gentle intoxication, and the mournful nature of her errand was for the moment forgotten. "Isn't it delicious here?" she exclaimed: "I think I should like to live in a green-house and grow like a plant." "A little of that kind of thing would do you no end of good," he replied--"a little concentrated sunshine and bright colors and the smell of the fresh earth, you know. If you were my patient, I would make you take a course of it. I'd say you wanted more vegetable tissue, and prescribe a green-house for six months. I've no doubt this man here would take you. A young-lady apprentice would be quite an attractive feature. You could pull off dead leaves and strike graceful attitudes, training up vines, like the gardener's daughter in Tennyson." "What are those gorgeous things?" she asked, pointing to a row of orchids hung on nails along the wall. "Those are epiphytic orchids--air-plants, you know: they require no earth for their roots: they live on the air." "Like a chameleon?" "Like a chameleon."