rted lips, in an anxiety too
great to be assuaged by her girlish pride in her own beauty. "This is
all very well," she said, "but he will not see me this way. Oh! if I
only dared to speak first. I wonder if it would be as the spirits said.
'If he is noble he will respond!' He _is_ noble, that's sure. 'Love
claims love,' they said. But I don't know as I love him. I _would_, if
that would fetch him, quick enough;" and the hot blood came surging up,
covering neck and brow with crimson.

VIII.

A BUD AND A BLOSSOM.

Farnham was sitting the next evening in his library, when Budsey
entered and said Mr. Ferguson desired to see him. The gaunt Scotchman
came in and said with feverish haste: "The cereus grandiflorus will be
goin' to bloom the night. The buds are tremblin' and laborin' now."
Farnham put on his hat and went to the conservatory, which was
separated from the house by the entire extent of the garden. Arriving
there, the gardener took him hurriedly to an inner room, dimly
lighted,--a small square piece between the ferns and the grapes,--where
the regal flower had a wall to itself. Two or three garden chairs were
disposed about the room. Ferguson mounted on one of them, and turned up
the gas so that its full light shone upon the plant. The bud was a very
large one, perfect and symmetrical; the strong sheath, of a rich and
even brown, as yet showed only a few fissures of its surface, but even
now a faint odor stole from the travailing sphere, as from a cracked
box of alabaster filled with perfume.

The face of the canny Fergus was lighted up with an eager joy. He had
watched the growth and progress of this plant from its infancy. He had
leaned above its cradle and taken pride in its size and beauty. He had
trained it over the wall--from which he had banished every rival--in
large and graceful curves, reaching from the door of the fernery to the
door of the grapery, till it looked, in the usual half light of the dim
chamber, like a well-regulated serpent maturing its designs upon the
neighboring paradise; and now the time was come when he was to see the
fruit of his patience and his care.

"Heaven be thankit," he murmured devoutly, "that I was to the fore when
it came."

"I thank you, Fergus, for calling me," said Farnham, smiling. "I know
it must have cost you an effort to divide such a sight with any one."

"It's your siller bought it," the Scotchman answered sturdily; "but
there's nobody knows it, or