He had not anything very particular to say; but it was not disagreeable, though there was little originality in it, and I had heard most of it before; and he helped me with some flowers in the green-house which had been sadly neglected, and we cut some of the finest of them in the garden, for the vase upon my little table upstairs; and he told me I ought to wear flowers in my hair, and he said he would bring me a wreath of briony. "I should like to bind the beautiful clustered berries over those brown locks of yours, Hester," he said. "I will tell you some day how I came to know the briony first, and fell in love with it--it was one of the first incidents in my life." "Tell me now then," said I. But he shook his head and smiled. "Not now--wait till I can get a wreath of it fresh from a Cambridgeshire hedgerow, and then I will tell you my tale." "I shall think it is a tale about a lady, if you speak of it so mysteriously," said I, and when I turned to him I saw he blushed. "It was so then," I said, with the slightest pique possible. I was not quite pleased. "There never was but one in the world to me, Hester," he said, and I very soon cast down my eyes, "so it could not be about a lady, unless it happened in a dream, and the lady was you." I looked at him with a strange perplexity, he was almost as hard to understand as Alice was--but he suddenly changed the conversation, and made me quite helpless for any further controversy by talking about what we were to do next week, after--I was always silenced in a moment by a reference to that. Then my father looked out from the library window and called to us. My father had been a good deal occupied with Harry, and I pleased myself with thinking that he began to like him already. They seemed very good friends, and Harry showed him so much deference and was so anxious to follow his wishes in everything, that I was very grateful to him; and all the more because I thought it was from his own natural goodness he did this, fully more than from a wish to please me.