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"You look quite like a bride, my dear Octavia," said Miss Belinda. "We are scarcely used to such things in Slowbridge." But Octavia only laughed a little. "I am going to get some pink roses, and fasten the ends with them, when we get into the garden," she said. She stopped for this purpose at the first rose-bush they reached.
"One day I was passing on the edge of town, and I see something like a man in a little yard by a little house with a sprinkling-pot squirting water on a rose-bush. Seemed to me, I'd seen something like it before, and I stopped at the gate, trying to figure out its brands. 'Twas not Perry Rountree, but 'twas the kind of a curdled jellyfish matrimony had made out of him.
As soon as quiet reigned again, he returned to Marie, and seated himself on a bench. Leaning his head in uncontrollable grief against the slender stem of the rose-bush, he moaned aloud: "Oh, my Emperor, my dear, good Emperor, why did you leave me?" Lightly Marie touched his shoulder in sympathy. The last rays of the setting sun had now departed. The last tones of the dirge had died away.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.
He carefully kept his eyes to this side and to that, as if examining the flowers, but noted all the same that Fiorsen had receded from the window. Rapid thought told him that the fellow would come back there to see if he were gone, and he placed himself before a rose-bush, where, at that reappearance, he could make a sign of recognition.
At this sudden noise from the rose-bush Mother Magpie's nerves were so shocked that she dropped the diamond helter-skelter into the hole. And in a moment she fell in after it, out of sight. She hoped that no one had seen her, but little Whitebird knew the place. He hopped after her and, perching on the edge of the hole, peered down into the hollow tree.
They wrangled over the dear little rose-bush and its burden until they went to sleep the one to dream that Miss Butterworth had risen in the morning with a new head of hair that reached to her knee, in whose luxuriance she could revel with interminable delight, and the other that the house was filled with roses; that they sprouted out of the walls, fluttered with beads of dew against the windows, strewed the floor, and filled the air with odor.
And when it lighted on a rose-bush or a yellow broom-flower, or poised on a swaying blade of grass, he crept up and admired its lovely colors without touching the fragile thing. But at last, as if suddenly remembering an errand which it had forgotten, the butterfly soared quickly up and away over the treetops and out of sight. "Good-by, little brother!" called John after it.
Zorzi went back to his furnace, Marietta exchanged a few words with her father and left the room again to go home. In the garden she paused a moment by the rose-bush, where she had talked with Zorzi, but there was not even the shadow of a smile in her face now. She went down the dark corridor and called the porter, who roused himself, opened the door and hailed the house opposite.
I have seen a bud on a rose-bush gradually unfold in days and weeks, till it became a rose, and hung there in its beauty, before I was aware how large and beautiful and red it had become; and the same thing I now saw in Anastasia. She was now a beautiful grown girl, and I had become a stout stripling.
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