“Ah!” he said softly; “ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!” He looked up, and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man kneeling on a garden path reverently worshipping a striped flower.  It was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated admiration for the new and strange; it was the love of a man for his work and appreciation of success in it, even if the success were another’s; also, perhaps, in part, the expression of a deep-seated national feeling for flowers.

“Is it what you wished?” Julia asked gently, conscious that she was, as always, a long way off from Joost.

“I did not wish it,” he said, “because I did not foresee it.  No one could foresee that it would come, though it always might.  It is a novelty, an accident of nature perhaps, but beautiful, wonderful!”

“Is it a real novelty?” Julia asked.  “Just as much as your first blue daffodil was?  Oh, I am glad!  Then you have two now.”

“I?” Joost said in surprise.  “No, not I; this is yours, not mine; you have grown it.”

“That’s nothing,” Julia returned easily; “you gave me the bulb; it is really your bulb; I only just put it into the ground, I have had nothing to do with the novelty.”

But if she thought to dispose of the matter in that way she soon found she was mistaken; there were apparently laws governing bulb growing which were as inviolable as any governing hereditary titles.  The man who bloomed the bulb was the man who had produced the novelty—­if novelty it was; he could no more make over his rights to another than a duke could his coronet.  In vain Julia protested that it was by the merest chance that Joost had hit on this particular sort to give her, that it was only an accident which had prevented him from blooming it himself.  He said that did not matter at all, and when she failed to be convinced, added that possibly, had he kept the bulb, the result might not have proved the same; her soil and treatment were doubtless both different.

Julia laughed at the idea, saying she knew nothing about soil and treatment.  But she made no impression on Joost and apparently did not alter the case; the laws of the bulb growers were not only like those of the “Medes and Persians which alter not,” but also refused to be bent or evaded even by a Polkington.

“It is yours,” Joost said, as he took a last look at the flower before he rose from his knees; “the great honour is yours, and I am glad of it.”

There was something in his tone which reminded Julia of that talk they had had in the little enclosed place on the last day she was at the bulb farm.  She hastily submitted so as to avoid the too personal.  “What am I to do with the honour?” she asked.  “I do not know, that is one reason why it is absurd for me to have it.”

“You must name your flower,” he told her; “and then you must exhibit it.  Fortunately you are in time for the show in London.”