“If the beaux and belles at this party have the wit to read your posies, my fortune will be made, and you will have your hands full supplying compliments, declarations, rebukes, and criticisms for the fashionable butterflies. I wish I could put consolation, hope, and submission into my work as easily, but I am afraid I can’t,” he added a moment afterward with a changed face, as he began to lay the loveliest white flowers into a box. “Those are not for a wedding, then?” “For a dead baby; and I can’t seem to find any white and sweet enough.” “You know the people?” asked Christie, with the sympathetic tone in her voice. “Never saw or heard of them till to-day. Isn’t it enough to know that ‘baby’s dead,’ as the poor man said, to make one feel for them?” “Of course it is; only you seemed so interested in arranging the flowers, I naturally thought it was for some friend,” Christie answered hastily, for David looked half indignant at her question. “I want them to look lovely and comforting when the mother opens the box, and I don’t seem to have the right flowers. Will you give it a touch? women have a tender way of doing such things that we can never learn.” “I don’t think I can improve it, unless I add another sort of flower that seems appropriate: may I?” “Any thing you can find.” Christie waited for no more, but ran out of the greenhouse to David’s great surprise, and presently came hurrying back with a handful of snow-drops. “Those are just what I wanted, but I didn’t know the little dears were up yet! You shall put them in, and I know they will suggest what you hope to these poor people,” he said approvingly, as he placed the box before her, and stood by watching her adjust the little sheaf of pale flowers tied up with a blade of grass. She added a frail fern or two, and did give just the graceful touch here and there which would speak to the mother’s sore heart of the tender thought some one had taken for her dead darling. The box was sent away, and Christie went on with her work, but that little task performed together seemed to have made them friends; and, while David tied up several grand bouquets at the same table, they talked as if the strangeness was fast melting away from their short acquaintance. Christie’s own manners were so simple that simplicity in others always put her at her ease: kindness soon banished her reserve, and the desire to show that she was grateful for it helped her to please. David’s bluntness was of such a gentle sort that she soon got used to it, and found it a pleasant contrast to the polite insincerity so common. He was as frank and friendly as a boy, yet had a certain paternal way with him which rather annoyed her at first, and made her feel as if he thought her a mere girl, while she was very sure he could not be but a year or two older than herself. “I’d rather he’d be masterful, and order me about,” she thought, still rather regretting the “blighted being” she had not found.