Kitty.  Forget-me-nots, you mean!

Rose.  Forget-me-nots, I mean.  And none but you to gather them for me, William.  Because—­because—­well, you do put me in thoughts of someone that I once held and now have lost.  That’s all.

[Curtain.

Act III.—­Scene 2.

The same room half an hour later.  Isabel is picking up the scattered orange blossom which she ties together and lays on the window sill.  Lubin comes in with a large bunch of river forget-me-nots.

Lubin.  I didn’t think to find you here, Isabel.

Isabel.  O but that is a beautiful blue flower.  I will take the bunch upstairs.  She is all dressed and ready for it.

Lubin. [Putting it on the table.] No—­do you bide a moment here with me.

[Isabel looks helplessly at Lubin who takes her hands slowly in his.

Lubin.  What are we going to do?

Isabel.  I wish as we had never touched the seeds.

Lubin.  O cursed seeds of love—­Far better to have left all as ’twas yesterday in the morning.

Isabel.  He has followed me like my shadow, courting and courting me hard and all the time, Lubin.

Lubin.  She sought me out in the yard at day-break, and what I’d have given twenty years of life for yester eve I could have thrown into the stream this morning.

Isabel [Sadly.] So ’tis with my feelings.

Lubin.  She has altered powerful, to my fancy, in these years.

Isabel.  And Robert be differenter too from what I do remember. [A long silence.

Lubin.  Have you thought as it might be in us two these changes have come about, Isabel?

Isabel.  I was just the maid as ever I was until —

Lubin.  And so was I unchanged, until I started travelling up on the same road as you, Isabel.

[For a few minutes they look gravely into one another’s eyes.

Lubin. [Taking ISABEL’S hands.] So that’s how ’tis with you and me.

Isabel.  O Lubin—­a poor serving maid like I am.

Lubin.  I’ll have no one else in the whole world.

Isabel.  What could I have seen in him, times gone by?

Lubin.  And was it ever true that I did sit through a long Sunday her hand in mine? [Another silence.

Isabel.  But how’s us ever to get out of the caddle where we be?

Lubin. [Gaily.] We’ll just run away off to the Fair as t’other servants did.

Isabel.  And leave them in their hate for one another?  No—­’twould be too cruel.  Us’ll run to the young mistress what knows all about them herbs.  I count as there be seeds or sommat which could set the hearts of them two back in the right places again.  Come —