“Why, then, I could believe,” he answered her, and his deep voice still thrilled with that note of emotion that was so inexpressibly musical to her ear, “that if a man were to be comforted by such as you, he might find a sweetness even in adversity—that is,” he added on a yet deeper note, “did he dare let himself be comforted.” She sighed and dropped her hands from his; took up her basket and rose to her feet. He also rose hastily, as if ashamed of his emotion, and once more wrapped reserve around him like a mantle. Presently he said, in that slightly jesting manner that never lost touch with melancholy: “Your father has long been looking for the lost ‘Star-of-Comfort.’ Your father is an amiable materialist and believes that a right-chosen drug can minister to a mind diseased. I fear me it will prove to him as frail a quest as that of the Fern Seed of invisibility and the Lotos of forgetfulness—and such like dreams of unattainable good!” “You are wrong, wrong again!” Although the moisture she scorned to brush away was still in her eyes, the smile was on her lip once more; and the dimple by it—a triumphant dimple. “How so?” he asked. “Why, sir, you once were a truer prophet than now you wot of. Did you not foretell to me, on the first day of my return, that I might help him to find it? The lost plant was, according to Master Ralph Prynne (of fragrant memory) well-known at one time in the south of France where, says he, upon diligent search it may even now be discovered among ruins and rocks!” Here she resumed her mock didactic manner. “‘It is my belief,’ says he, ‘that the gay and singularly careless temper of these peoples is due in great part to the ancient custom of brewing it into the wine they did drink of—whereby their sons and daughters did inherit the happy tendencies engendered in themselves—and splenetic melancholy which sits so black on many of our country is never known among them.’” “A wondrous drug!” said David. “So I thought,” she retorted; and, with a mocking glance at him, went on: “And knowing how many indeed stand in need of it here, I who had recently come myself from the south of France, resolved to get him the seed or root, if such were to be obtained. Master Prynne gives a very detailed description and I have a good memory. There was one, a wise woman I knew of, who was learned in simples. In fine, sir, turn and behold!” She twisted him round, led him a pace or two forward, and pointed. On a shallow bed, sloping to due south, screened from the north and prepared with a kind of rockery clothed with mingled sand and heather soil, a hardy-looking dwarf plant was growing in thick patches. And sundry small but vigorous off-shoots, darting here and there gave promise that they would soon cover the bed and overhang its rocky borders. The full sunshine blazed down upon it, and the minute bright and bold blossoms that gemmed it already in places looked like stars of bluish flame among the lustrous dark green leaves.