ed to wait for
a fitting opportunity. The opportunity did not come; but in course of
time the whisky was moved and gave comfort of sorts during the autumn
days to the Captain's drooping spirits, if it had a less beneficial
effect on his failing health.

In the meantime the daffodil, "The Good Comrade," had gone back to its
native land, and with it an appeal, written in English, badly written,
scrawled almost--but not likely to be refused. Joost read it through
once, twice, more times than that; it said little, only, take back the
bulb and ask no questions, yet he felt he had been honoured by Julia's
confidence. The very style and haste of the letter seemed an honour to
him; it showed him she had need and had turned to him in it. Of course
he would do as she asked; he would have done things far harder than
that. He folded the slip of paper and put it away where he kept some
few treasures, and for a time he put with it the bulb she had sent;
and sometimes when he went to bed of a night--he had no other free
time--he took both out and looked at them.

But "The Good Comrade" did not remain locked away from the light of day.
Joost was a sentimentalist, it is true, and the bulb had come from
Julia, winged by an appeal from her. But he was also a bulb grower,
and he was that before he was anything else and afterwards too, and
the daffodil was a marvel of nature, a novelty, a thing beyond words
to a connoisseur. The lover asked that the token should be kept hidden
from the eyes of men; but the grower cried that the flower should be
given to the light of heaven and should grow and bloom according to
Nature's plan. For days the lover was uppermost and the old pain back.
But in time the bitter-sweet madness died down again and, in the
atmosphere which was saturated with the beloved work, the old love,
the first and last and soundly abiding one, reasserted itself. The
daffodil must bloom, the little brown bulb must go back to the brown
earth, the strange flower must unfold itself to the sun and wind and
rain.

So he went to his father. "My father," he said, and it is to be feared
he had learnt something of guile from the source of his bitter-sweet
madness. "My father, I have heard from Miss Julia; she would wish us
to have the narcissus 'The Good Comrade.'"

Mijnheer was pleased. "That is as it should be," he said; he had felt
strongly about the gift of the bulb in the first instance, but that
was an affair over and done with