with no pretense whatever. When Margaret had disburdened herself of
excuses for dropping in to watch Richard mold his leaves and flowers,
she came oftener, and Richard insensibly drifted into the habit of
expecting her on certain days, and was disappointed when she failed
to appear. His industry had saved him, until now, from discovering
how solitary his life really was; for his life was as solitary--as
solitary as that of Margaret, who lived in the great house with only
her father, the two servants, and an episodical aunt. The mother was
long ago dead; Margaret could not recollect when that gray headstone,
with blotches of rusty-green moss breaking out over the lettering,
was not in the churchyard; and there never had been any brothers or
sisters.

To Margaret Richard's installation in the empty room, where as a
child she had always been afraid to go, was the single important
break she could remember in the monotony of her existence; and now a
vague yearning for companionship, the blind sense of the plant
reaching towards the sunshine, drew her there. The tacitly prescribed
half hour often lengthened to an hour. Sometimes Margaret brought a
book with her, or a piece of embroidery, and the two spoke scarcely
ten words, Richard giving her a smile now and then, and she returning
a sympathetic nod as the cast came out successfully.

Margaret at fifteen--she was fifteen now--was not a beauty. There
is the loveliness of the bud and the loveliness of the full-blown
flower; but Margaret as a blossom was not pretty. She was awkward and
angular, with prominent shoulder-blades, and no soft curves anywhere
in her slimness; only her black hair, growing low on the forehead,
and her eyes were fine. Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead
and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of