"O, what's the use of talking, Tulee!" exclaimed she, impatiently. "I
have no friends to go to, and I _must_ stay here." But, reproaching
herself for rejecting the sympathy so tenderly offered, she rose and
kissed the black cheek as she added, "Good Tulee! kind Tulee! I _am_ a
little homesick; but I shall feel better in the morning."

The next afternoon Gerald and Rosa invited her to join them in a drive
round the island. She declined, saying the box that was soon to be
sent to Madame was not quite full, and she wanted to finish some more
articles to put in it. But she felt a longing for the fresh air, and
the intense blue glory of the sky made the house seem prison-like. As
soon as they were gone, she took down her straw hat and passed out,
swinging it by the strings. She stopped on the lawn to gather some
flame-colored buds from a Pyrus Japonica, and, fastening them in the
ribbons as she went, she walked toward her old familiar haunts in the
woods.

It was early in February, but the warm sunshine brought out a
delicious aroma from the firs, and golden garlands of the wild
jasmine, fragrant as heliotrope, were winding round the evergreen
thickets, and swinging in flowery festoons from the trees. Melancholy
as she felt when she started from the cottage, her elastic nature was
incapable of resisting the glory of the sky, the beauty of the earth,
the music of the birds, and the invigorating breath of the ocean,
intensified as they all were by a joyful sense of security and
freedom, growing out of the constraint that had lately been put upon
her movements. She tripped along faster, carolling as she went an
old-fashioned song that her father used to be often humming:--