“Is it not sweet?” said she then, bending over it.

“They have no scent,” said her mother.

“Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a kind of aerial perfume; they must of course alchemize the air into which they waste their fibres with some sweetness.”

“A smell of earth fresh from ‘wholesome drench of April rains,’” said Mr. Raleigh, taking the dish of white porcelain between his brown, slender hands.  “An immature scent, just such an innocent breath as should precede the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor, that complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea.  The charm of these first bidders for the year’s favor is neither in the ethereal texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed, blood-stained, ancient leaves.  This imponderable soul gives them such a helpless air of babyhood.”

“Is fragrance the flower’s soul?” asked Marguerite.  “Then anemones are not divinely gifted.  And yet you said, the other day, that to paint my portrait would be to paint an anemone.”

“A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery,” said Mrs. Purcell.

“A flaw in the indictment!” replied Mr. Raleigh.  “I am not one of those who paint the lily.”

“Though you’ve certainly added a perfume to the violet,” remarked Mr. Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering accent familiarly called the drawl, as he looked at the hepaticas.

“I don’t think it very complimentary, at any rate,” continued Marguerite.  “They are not lovely after bloom,—­only the little pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so demurely. Oui, da! I have exchanged great queen magnolias for rues; what will you give me for pomegranates and oleanders?”

“Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?” asked Mrs. Laudersdale.

“Not the very same.  The hurricane destroyed those, years ago; these are others, grand and rosy as sunrise sometimes.”

“It was my Aunt Susanne who planted those, I have heard.”

“And it was your daughter Rite who planted these.”

“She buried a little box of old keepsakes at its foot, after her brother had examined them,—­a ring or two, a coin from which she broke and kept one half”------

“Oh, yes! we found the little box, found it when Mr. Heath was in Martinique, all rusted and moulded and falling apart, and he wears that half of the coin on his watch-chain.  See!”

Mrs. Laudersdale glanced up indifferently, but Mrs. Purcell sprang from her elegant lounging and bent to look at her brother’s chain.

“How odd that I never noticed it, Fred!” she exclaimed.  “And how odd that I should wear the same!” And, shaking her chatelaine, she detached a similar affair.

They were placed side by side in Mr. Raleigh’s hand; they matched entirely, and, so united, they formed a singular French coin of value and antiquity, the missing figures on one segment supplied by the other, the embossed profile continued and lost on each, the scroll begun by this and ended by that; they were plainly severed portions of the same piece.