I involuntarily started, and looked up into her face, as she said this; but not a shade of embarrassment was to be seen there.
She went on to say—"He gave it to me because I was so fond of this poor flower;" and she pointed to a sickly creeping plant, that grew out of a pot, which was placed on the window sill.
"You would not know it again now," she continued; "but last summer it was growing against the wall in the little patch of garden we had at Bromley, and a beautiful flower it was."
"But what had it to do with this book, more than any other flower, Alice?"
"It is a little story, but I will tell it you if you wish it. I sprained my ankle last summer, and could not walk for many weeks. Granny or brother Walter used to drive me in my chair to the open window, to breathe the fresh air, and look at the flowers in our little garden. There was nothing else to look at there—nothing but roofs of houses and black chimneys; but up the wall, and as high as my window, grew this very plant, that looks so dead now, poor thing. Day after day I watched its flowers, though I did not know their names, till I got to see in them things that I thought nobody but me had ever noticed."
"What things, Alice?"
"Across, a crown of thorns, nails, and a hammer."
"The Passion Flower!"
"So Mr. Henry told me one day when he found me reading my new kind of book. It was like a book to me, that pretty flower; it made me think of holy things as much as a sermon ever did."
"And Henry brought you then this book, because of the poem in it on the Passion Flower?"