“Nothing near so much, Lu!”

“Why didn’t you have them, then?” asked Rose, quickly.

“Oh, they belonged to Yone; and uncle gave me these, which I like better.  Amber is warm, and smells of the earth; but this is cool and dewy, and”——­

“Smells of heaven?” asked I, significantly.

Mr. Dudley began to fidget, for he saw no chance of finishing his exposition.

“As I was saying, Miss Louisa,” he began, in a different key.

I took my beads and wound them round my wrist.  “You haven’t as much eye for color as a poppy-bee,” I exclaimed, in a corresponding key, and looking up at Rose.

“Unjust.  I was thinking then how entirely they suited you.”

“Thank you.  Vastly complimentary from one who ’don’t like amber’!”

“Nevertheless, you think so.”

“Yes and no.  Why don’t you like it?”

“You mustn’t ask me for my reasons.  It is not merely disagreeable, but hateful.”

“And you’ve been beside me, like a Christian, all this time, and I had it!”

“The perfume is acrid; I associate it with the lower jaw of St. Basil the Great, styled a present of immense value, you remember,—­being hard, heavy, shining like gold, the teeth yet in it, and with a smell more delightful than amber,”—­making a mock shudder at the word.

“Oh, it is prejudice, then.”

“Not in the least.  It is antipathy.  Besides, the thing is unnatural; there is no existent cause for it.  A bit that turns up on certain sands,—­here at home, for aught I know, as often as anywhere.”

“Which means Nazareth.  We must teach you, Sir, that there are some things at home as rare as those abroad.”

“I am taught,” he said, very low, and without looking up.

“Just tell me, what is amber?”

“Fossil gum.”

“Can you say those words and not like it?  Don’t it bring to you a magnificent picture of the pristine world,—­great seas and other skies,—­a world of accentuated crises, that sloughed off age after age, and rose fresher from each plunge?  Don’t you see, or long to see, that mysterious magic tree out of whose pores oozed this fine solidified sunshine?  What leaf did it have? what blossom? what great wind shivered its branches?  Was it a giant on a lonely coast, or thick low growth blistered in ravines and dells?  That’s the witchery of amber,—­that it has no cause,—­that all the world grew to produce it,—­may-be died and gave no other sign,—­that its tree, which must have been beautiful, dropped all its fruits; and how bursting with juice must they have been”——­

“Unfortunately, coniferous.”

“Be quiet.  Stripped itself of all its lush luxuriance, and left for a vestige only this little fester of its gashes.”

“No, again,” he once more interrupted.  “I have seen remnants of the wood and bark in a museum.”

“Or has it hidden and compressed all its secret here?” I continued, obliviously.  “What if in some piece of amber an accidental seed were sealed, we found, and planted, and brought back the lost aeons?  What a glorious world that must have been, where even the gum was so precious!”