Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and, emptying a carafe into a dish of moss that stood near, took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and, sitting on the footstool, began to rearrange them. It was curious to see, that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let the stem lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into the place designated for it by Marguerite's fingers, that sparkled in the mosaic till double wreaths of gold-threaded purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and melted into a fringe of the starry spires of winter-green. "Is it not sweet?" said she then, bending over it. "They have no scent," said her mother. "Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a kind of aërial perfume; they must of course alchemize the air into which they waste their fibres with some sweetness." "A smell of earth fresh from 'wholesome drench of April rains,'" said Mr. Raleigh, taking the dish of white porcelain between his brown, slender hands. "An immature scent, just such an innocent breath as should precede the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor, that complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea. The charm of these first bidders for the year's favor is neither in the ethereal texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed, blood-stained, ancient leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a helpless air of babyhood." "Is fragrance the flower's soul?" asked Marguerite. "Then anemones are not divinely gifted. And yet you said, the other day, that to paint my portrait would be to paint an anemone." "A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery," said Mrs. Purcell. "A flaw in the indictment!" replied Mr. Raleigh. "I am not one of those who paint the lily." "Though you've certainly added a perfume to the violet," remarked Mr. Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering accent familiarly called the drawl, as he looked at the hepaticas. "I don't think it very complimentary, at any rate," continued Marguerite. "They are not lovely after bloom,--only the little pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so demurely. _Oui, dà!_ I have exchanged great queen magnolias for rues; what will you give me for pomegranates and oleanders?" "Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?" asked Mrs. Laudersdale. "Not the very same. The hurricane destroyed those, years ago; these are others, grand and rosy as sunrise sometimes." "It was my Aunt Susanne who planted those, I have heard." "And it was your daughter Rite who planted these." "She buried a little box of old keepsakes at its foot, after her brother had examined them,--a ring or two, a coin from which she broke and kept one half"------ "Oh, yes! we found the little box, found it when Mr. Heath was in Martinique, all rusted and moulded and falling apart, and he wears that half of the coin on his watch-chain. See!" Mrs. Laudersdale glanced up indifferently, but Mrs. Purcell sprang from her elegant lounging and bent to look at her brother's chain.