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"Husband! husband!" cried his wife, showing her horror-stricken face through the window-panes. "There is no need of going for the child's parents!" "We told you so, father!" screamed Violet and Peony, as he re-entered the parlour. "You would bring her in; and now our poor dear beau-ti-ful little snow-sister is thawed!"
Beauty is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the bluebell, the daffodil the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the peony they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways into the Kingdom of God.
But you must know a mother listens with her heart, much more than with her ears; and thus she is often delighted with the trills of celestial music, when other people can hear nothing of the kind. "Peony, Peony!" cried Violet to her brother, who had gone to another part of the garden, "bring me some of that fresh snow, Peony, from the very farthest corner, where we have not been trampling.
Lindsey led her up the steps of the door, Violet and Peony looked into his face their eyes full of tears, which froze before they could run down their cheeks and again entreated him not to bring their snow-image into the house. "Not bring her in!" exclaimed the kind-hearted man. "Why, you are crazy, my little Violet! quite crazy, my small Peony!
I looked at her; I think she understood, for her eyes were raised to mine for a moment and then fell, leaving her cheeks as red as peony roses. With a manifest effort she went on with her story: "The Doctor was with us in an incredibly short time. The groom had met him letting himself into his house with his latchkey, and he came here running.
I dare say that she was thinking of her garden that very day, and wondering if this plant or that were not in bloom, and perhaps had a heartache at the thought that her tenants, the careless colored children, might tread the young shoots of peony and rose, and make havoc in the herb-bed. It was an uncommon collection, made by years of patient toil and self-sacrifice.
As she slowly attired herself, however, she wondered very much why he was so set upon denuding her of her accustomed magnificence. Her mind was entirely unable to grasp his conception of beauty and of attractiveness. She thought all men preferred the peony to the violet. To-night it was very certain that she would be no peony, scarcely even a violet.
To look at them, frolicking in the wintry garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for Violet and Peony; and that they themselves had been created, as the snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white mantle which it spread over the earth.
Standing behind the trunk, Hilda held forth her hand for the letter. "Please, miss, it's for me," Florrie whispered, like a criminal. "For you?" Hilda cried, startled. In proof Florrie timidly exposed the envelope, on which Hilda plainly saw, in a coarse, scrawling masculine hand, the words "Miss Florrie Bagster." Florrie's face was a burning peony.
So Adelais laughed, but a moment later, recollecting the man's cold desire of her, his iron fervors, Adelais shuddered. This was in the court-yard at Winstead. Roger Darke of Yaxham, the girl's cousin, standing beside her, noted the gesture, and snarled. "Think twice of it, Adelais," said he. Whereupon Mistress Vernon flushed like a peony.
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