About a week after her arrival—she having expressed her admiration of ferns the night before—he draws her hand through his arm and takes her to his own special sanctum,—off which a fernery has been thrown, he being an enthusiastic grower of that lovely weed.
Mona is enchanted with the many varieties she sees that are unknown to her, and, being very much not of the world, is not ashamed to express her delight. Looking carefully through all, she yet notices that a tiny one, dear to her, because common to her sweet Killarney, is not among his collection.
She tells him of it, and he is deeply interested; and when she proposes to write and get him one from her native soil, he is glad as a schoolboy promised a new bat, and her conquest of Sir Nicholas is complete.
And indeed the thought of this distant fern is as dear to Mona as to him. For to her comes a rush of tender joy, as she tells herself she may soon be growing in this alien earth a green plant torn from her fatherland.
"But I hope you will not be disappointed when you see it," she says, gently. "You have the real Killarney fern, Sir Nicholas, I can see; the other, I speak of, though to me almost as lovely, is not a bit like it."
She is very careful to give him his title ever since that encounter with his mother.
"I shall not be disappointed. I have read all about it," returns he, enthusiastically. Then, as though the thought has just struck him, he says,—
"Why don't you call me Nicholas, as Geoffrey does?"
Mona hesitates, then says, shyly, with downcast eyes,—
"Perhaps Lady Rodney would not like it."