"No," she said; "we always found it difficult to make things quite plain, it is no use trying now. Come and see the daffodil, you will understand that, at all events, and better than I do. It is not quite fully out yet, but very nearly, and--please don't be disappointed--it is not a real true blue daffodil at all." She took him to the chosen spot and showed him the plant--a bunch of long narrow leaves rising from the brown earth, and in the midst of them a single stalk supporting a partly opened flower. In shape it was single, like the common wild blossom, only much bigger; but in colour, not blue as was expected, but streaked in irregular unblended stripes of pure yellow and pure blue. The marking was as hard and unshaded as that of the old-fashioned brown and yellow tulips which children call bulls'-eyes, and the effect, though bizarre, was not at all pretty. Julia did not think it so, and she did not expect any one else to either; but Joost, when he saw the streaky flower, gave a little inarticulate exclamation and, dropping on his knees on the path, lifted the bell reverently so that he might look into it. "Ah!" he said softly; "ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!" He looked up, and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man kneeling on a garden path reverently worshipping a striped flower. It was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated admiration for the new and strange; it was the love of a man for his work and appreciation of success in it, even if the success were another's; also, perhaps, in part, the expression of a deep-seated national feeling for flowers. "Is it what you wished?" Julia asked gently, conscious that she was, as always, a long way off from Joost. "I did not wish it," he said, "because I did not foresee it. No one could foresee that it would come, though it always might. It is a novelty, an accident of nature perhaps, but beautiful, wonderful!" "Is it a real novelty?" Julia asked. "Just as much as your first blue daffodil was? Oh, I am glad! Then you have two now." "I?" Joost said in surprise. "No, not I; this is yours, not mine; you have grown it." "That's nothing," Julia returned easily; "you gave me the bulb; it is really your bulb; I only just put it into the ground, I have had nothing to do with the novelty."