Then she turned to him, and cried bitterly:
“You gave me the seeds—what is wrong with them? I cannot alter them from what they are.”
“Perhaps it would be best if now you left the garden,” he answered slowly, “seeing it is so profitless.”
But she looked at him with straining eyes, and answered:
“I can’t. It’s the work I have been put to do, and I must finish it. I told the frog I thought my heart was in that first hard mound, and I believe it is. But there’s something else beside my heart, and that’s there too, and I’ll never be free till it is free. And what can I do? I am mad. I see things beautiful that others only stare at, and then pass by with scarcely one comment. And the old cruel voice keeps crying, ‘Go on! go on!’ and whither can I go? The path is all so black that, forward or backward, I am lost whichever way I turn.”
Then because he did not answer, she said at last:
“Send it, the first I brought to you, that brilliant moonstone, to some other place. The man who called it rubbish can’t have any eyes.”
“Just as you like,” he answered.
Then she went away.
In the plantation there had set so hard a frost that everything was white and stiff and ice-bound. There lay the half-chipped mound containing the other jewel scarce yet visible. But Rosalie had no heart to touch it, even had the frost allowed her.