“I see a river,” said the woman in a feeble voice, seeming to look within herself with deep attention, notwithstanding her closed eyelids. “I see a pretty garden—”
“Why do you enter by the river and the garden?” said Minoret.
“Because they are there.”
“Who?”
“The young girl and her nurse, whom you are thinking of.”
“What is the garden like?” said Minoret.
“Entering by the steps which go down to the river, there is the right, a long brick gallery, in which I see books; it ends in a singular building,—there are wooden bells, and a pattern of red eggs. To the left, the wall is covered with climbing plants, wild grapes, Virginia jessamine. In the middle is a sun-dial. There are many plants in pots. Your child is looking at the flowers. She shows them to her nurse—she is making holes in the earth with her trowel, and planting seeds. The nurse is raking the path. The young girl is pure as an angel, but the beginning of love is there, faint as the dawn—”
“Love for whom?” asked the doctor, who, until now, would have listened to no word said to him by somnambulists. He considered it all jugglery.
“You know nothing—though you have lately been uneasy about her health,” answered the woman. “Her heart has followed the dictates of nature.”
“A woman of the people to talk like this!” cried the doctor.