At Last | Page 5

of relieving her of the flowers,
and Aunt Rachel judiciously turned her back upon them, and began a
diligent search in the beaufet for a vase.
"Do you expect us to believe that you have been more industrious than
we? As if we did not know that you bribed the gardener to have a
bouquet cut and laid ready for you at the back-door," Frederic charged
upon the matutinal Flora. "Else, where are other evidences of your
stroll, in dew-sprinkled draperies and wet feet? Confess that you ran
down stairs just two minutes ago! Now that I come to think of it, I am
positive that I heard you, while Mrs. Sutton was lamenting your drowsy
proclivities after sunrise."
"I have been sitting in the summer-house for an hour--reading!"
protested Mabel, wondrously resigned to the detention, after a single,
and not violent attempt at release. "If you had opened your shutters you
must have seen me. But I knew I was secure from observation on that
side of the house, at least until eight o'clock, about which time the
glories of the new day usually penetrate very tightly-closed lids. As to
dew--there isn't a drop upon grass or blossom. And, by the same token,
we shall have a storm within twenty-four hours."
"Is that true? That is a meteorological presage I never heard of until
now."
"There is a moral in it, which I leave you to study out for yourself,
while I arrange the roses I--and not the gardener--gathered."
In a whisper, she subjoined--"Let me go! Some one is coming!" and in
a second more was at the sideboard, hurrying the flowers into the
antique china bowl, destined to grace the centre of the breakfast table.
"Good-morning, Miss Rosa. You are just in season to enjoy the society
of your sister," Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the billows of mingled
white and red, tossing under Mabel's fingers.
The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her
elbow, and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile.
"They are scentless!" she complained.
"Because dewless!" replied Mabel, with profound gravity. "It is the
tearful heart that gives out the sweetest fragrance."
"I have more faith in sunshine," interrupted Rosa, a tinge of contempt
in her smile and accent. "Or--to drop metaphors, at which I always

bungle--it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good. All
this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their
fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the
blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my
doctrine. A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one. What
it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is the odor
of incipient decay."
"You are illustrating your position by means of my poor oriental pearl,"
remonstrated Mabel, playfully, wresting the hand that was beating the
life and whiteness out of the floweret upon the marble top of the
beaufet. "Take this hardy geant de batailles, instead. My bouquet must
have a cluster of pearls for a heart."
"What a fierce crimson!" Frederic remarked upon the widely-opened
rose Miss Tazewell received in place of the delicate bud. "That must be
the 'hue angry, yet brave,' which, Mr. George Herbert asserts, 'bids the
rash gazer wipe his eye.'"
"More poetical nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold
"geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be comic,
and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush,
and ran a thorn into the pupil."
No one answered, except by the indulgent smile that usually greeted
her sallies, howeve? absurd, among those accustomed to the spoiled
child's vagaries.
Mabel was making some leisurely additions to her bouquet in the shape
of ribbon grass and pendent ivy sprays, coaxing these with persuasive
touches to trail over the edge and entwine the pedestal of the salver on
which her bowl was elevated; her head set slightly on one side, her lips
apart in a smile of enjoyment in her work and in herself. It was a
picture the lover studied fondly--one that hung forever thereafter in his
gallery of mental portraits. Beyond a pair of fine gray eyes, the pliant
grace of her figure and the buoyant carriage of youth, health, and a glad
heart, Mabel's pretensions to beauty were comparatively few, said the
world. Frederic Chilton had, nevertheless, fallen in love with her at
sight, and considered her, now, the handsomest woman of his
acquaintance. Her dress was a simple lawn--a sheer white fabric, with
bunches of purple grass bound up with yellow wheat, scattered over it;
her hair was lustrous and abundant, and her face, besides being happy,

was frank and intelligent, with wonderful mobility of