as the only one that particularly appealed to his rather dull sense
of smell; the reason being that in the old garden of the house in
which he was born there was always a huge straggling patch of
mignonette. His mother used to sit there on summer mornings and read
to him, and when he lay on his back in the sunshine he used to watch
the butterflies and humming-birds and trees, and sniff the fragrance
that filled the air. When his mother died, he wandered into the
garden, sought the familiar corner, and flung himself on the bed of
mignonette to cry his heart out--the lonely heart of an eight-year-old
boy. That was five and twenty years ago, but he never passed a
florist's open door in summer-time without remembering that despairing
hour and the fragrance of the flowers, bruised with his weight and
moist with his tears.

The girl vanished the moment the steamer was out of sight of the dock,
and Fergus did not give her another thought for a day or two. He had
liked her green cloth dress and the hat that framed her young,
laughing, plucky face. He had thought her name suited her, and
wondered what dignified appellation had been edited, cut, and
metamorphosed to make "Tommy," deciding after a look at the passenger
list that it was Thomasina, and that the girl must be Miss Thomasina
Tucker, an alliterative combination which did not appeal to his
literary taste.

The voyage was a rough one, and he saw her only now and then, always
alone, and generally standing on the end of the ship, her green cape
blowing in a gale of wind and showing a scarlet lining, her mignonette
hat exchanged for a soft green thing with an upstanding scarlet quill.
She was the only companionable person on board, but he did not know
her and sat nowhere near her at table, an assemblage of facts that
seemed to settle the matter, considering the sort of man he was and
the sort of girl she was.

"She's too pretty and too young to be gallivanting about 'on her
own,'" he said to himself one morning, when Tommy stood on the upper
deck looking out to sea and, as far as he could judge, singing, though
there was such a gale blowing that he could not hear her voice. "But
all the girls are the same nowadays,"--and he puffed his pipe
disconsolately; "all the same; brisk, self-supporting, good fellows.
If I ever met a nice, unsuccessful-but-not-depressed sort of girl,
soft but not silly, mild but not tame, flexible but not docile,
spirited but not domineering, I thi