After a quick, questioning look at her mother, she complied, laughing.
"Ah, that puts life into me," I said. "You can tell them all that you did me more good than the doctor. I'll go with you to see the robins soon."
"I've got something else for thee downstairs," she whispered, "something that Emily Warren gathered for thee," and she was gone in a flash.
A moment later she stood in the doorway, announced in advance by the perfume of an exquisite cluster of rosebuds arranged in a dainty vase entwined and half hidden with myrtle.
"Put the vase on the table by Richard, and then thee mustn't come any more."
"Thee surely are from the Garden of Eden," I exclaimed. "These and your kiss, Zillah, will make me well. Tell Miss Warren that I am going to thank her myself. Good-by now," and she flitted out of the room, bright with the unalloyed happiness of a child.
"Dear me," said Mrs. Yocomb, "thee must indeed get strong fast, for I do have such a time keeping the young people out of thy room. Reuben asks a dozen times a day if he can see thee, and father's nearly as bad. No more shall see thee to-day, I promise thee. Now thee must rest till to-morrow."
I was well content, for the roses brought a presence very near. In their fragrance, their beauty, their dewy freshness, their superiority to other flowers, they seemed the emblem of the maiden who had made harmony in the garden when Nature was at her best. The scene, as we had stood there together, grew so vivid that I saw her again almost in reality, her face glowing with the undisguised, irrepressible pleasure that had been caused by my unexpected tribute to the absolute truthfulness of her character. Again I heard her piquant laugh; then her sweet, vibratory voice as she sang hymns that awakened other than religious emotions, I fear. By an odd freak of fancy the flowers seemed an embodied strain from Chopin's nocturne that she had played, and the different shades of color the rising and falling of the melody.
"What do they mean?" I murmured to myself. "At any rate I see no York and Lancaster buds among them."
"Is thee so very fond of roses that thee gazes so long and intently at them?" Mrs. Yocomb quietly asked.