“Do you expect us to believe that you have been more industrious than we?  As if we did not know that you bribed the gardener to have a bouquet cut and laid ready for you at the back-door,” Frederic charged upon the matutinal Flora.  “Else, where are other evidences of your stroll, in dew-sprinkled draperies and wet feet?  Confess that you ran down stairs just two minutes ago!  Now that I come to think of it, I am positive that I heard you, while Mrs. Sutton was lamenting your drowsy proclivities after sunrise.”

“I have been sitting in the summer-house for an hour—­reading!” protested Mabel, wondrously resigned to the detention, after a single, and not violent attempt at release.  “If you had opened your shutters you must have seen me.  But I knew I was secure from observation on that side of the house, at least until eight o’clock, about which time the glories of the new day usually penetrate very tightly-closed lids.  As to dew—­there isn’t a drop upon grass or blossom.  And, by the same token, we shall have a storm within twenty-four hours.”

“Is that true?  That is a meteorological presage I never heard of until now.”

“There is a moral in it, which I leave you to study out for yourself, while I arrange the roses I—­and not the gardener—­gathered.”

In a whisper, she subjoined—­“Let me go!  Some one is coming!” and in a second more was at the sideboard, hurrying the flowers into the antique china bowl, destined to grace the centre of the breakfast table.

“Good-morning, Miss Rosa.  You are just in season to enjoy the society of your sister,” Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the billows of mingled white and red, tossing under Mabel’s fingers.

The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her elbow, and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile.

“They are scentless!” she complained.

“Because dewless!” replied Mabel, with profound gravity.  “It is the tearful heart that gives out the sweetest fragrance.”

“I have more faith in sunshine,” interrupted Rosa, a tinge of contempt in her smile and accent.  “Or—­to drop metaphors, at which I always bungle—­it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good.  All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my doctrine.  A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one.  What it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is the odor of incipient decay.”

“You are illustrating your position by means of my poor oriental pearl,” remonstrated Mabel, playfully, wresting the hand that was beating the life and whiteness out of the floweret upon the marble top of the beaufet.  “Take this hardy geant de batailles, instead.  My bouquet must have a cluster of pearls for a heart.”