"There is a sort of thin, consumptive, beggarly little leaf up here which looks something like your description. Shall I bring him down?"
"No, no; do not touch it," she answered, springing up the rocks toward him. "If it should be! But—I don't believe you know."
But he did know; for it was there. Very small and slender, creeping close to the rocks in the shyest way, half lost in the deep moss; but there! Heathcote had not moved; but the shrinking little plant happened to have placed itself exactly on a line with his idle eyes.
"It is unfair that you should find it without stirring, while I have had such a hard climb all in vain," said Anne, carefully taking up the little plant, with sufficient earth and moss to keep it comfortable.
"It is ever so," replied her companion, lazily, watching the spirals of cigar smoke above his head: "wait, and in time everything will come to you. If not in this world, then certainly in the next, which is the world I have selected for my own best efforts."
When the fern was properly bedded in the tin case, and the cover closed, Anne sat down for a moment to rest.
"When shall we have lunch?" asked the smoker.
"You?"
"Yes; I am bitterly hungry."
"But you said you were only going to stay a short time."