“Ise nothin’ to complain of Massa Gerald,” she answered; “but I’d like better to belong to myself.”

“So you’d like to be free, would you?” asked Flora.

“To be sure I would,” said Tulee.  “Yo like it yerself, don’t ye, little missy?”

Then, suddenly recollecting what a narrow escape her young lady had had from the auction-stand, she hastened with intuitive delicacy to change the subject.  But the same thought had occurred to Flora; and she fell asleep, thinking how Tulee’s wishes could be gratified.

When morning floated upward out of the arms of night, in robe of brightest saffron, the aspect of everything was changed.  Floracita sprang out of bed early, eager to explore the surroundings of their new abode.  The little lawn looked very beautiful, sprinkled all over with a variety of wild-flowers, in whose small cups dewdrops glistened, prismatic as opals.  The shrubbery was no longer a dismal mass of darkness, but showed all manner of shadings of glossy green leaves, which the moisture of the night had ornamented with shimmering edges of crystal beads.  She found the phantom of the night before browsing among flowers behind the cottage, and very kindly disposed to make her acquaintance.  As he had a thistle blossom sticking out of his mouth, she forthwith named him Thistle.  She soon returned to the house with her apron full of vines, and blossoms, and prettily tinted leaves.  “See, Tulee,” said she, “what a many flowers!  I’m going to make haste and dress the table, before Gerald and Rosa come to breakfast.”  They took graceful shape under her nimble fingers, and, feeling happy in her work, she began to hum,

“How brightly breaks the morning!”

“Whisper low!” sang Gerald, stealing up behind her, and making her start by singing into her very ear; while Rosa exclaimed, “What a fairy-land you have made here, with all these flowers,_pichoncita mia_”

The day passed pleasantly enough, with some ambling along the bridle-paths on Thistle’s back, some reading and sleeping, and a good deal of music.  The next day, black Tom came with a barouche, and they took a drive round the lovely island.  The cotton-fields were all abloom on Gerald’s plantation, and his stuccoed villa, with spacious veranda and high porch, gleamed out in whiteness among a magnificent growth of trees, and a garden gorgeous with efflorescence.  The only drawback to the pleasure was, that Gerald charged them to wear thick veils, and never to raise them when any person was in sight.  They made no complaint, because he told them that he should be deeply involved in trouble if his participation in their escape should be discovered; but, happy as Rosa was in reciprocated love, this necessity of concealment was a skeleton ever sitting at her feast; and Floracita, who had no romantic compensation for it, chafed under the restraint.  It was dusk when they returned to the cottage, and the thickets were alive with fire-flies, as if Queen Mab and all her train were out dancing in spangles.