"I have been too busy since my return to go over the place," said the naturalist as they set forth. "Beginning with this morning we will go over a portion of it daily until the entire place has been inspected. Will it be too much of a walk for you to take the gardens and the orchard today?"
"Why, no;" answered Bee quickly. "I am used to walking, father. We always walked into town from Uncle Henry's, and to school too. Aunt Annie thought it was good for us. Then I run about the fields quite a little."
"Annie has followed my idea exactly," he commented approvingly. "There is nothing so conducive to good health as outdoor exercise. Ah! here we are at the gardens. They have been well kept; but, but—" He glanced around the mass of blossom and vines knitting his brows in perplexity. "The rose?" he said. "The one your mother planted. Can this be it?"
He stopped beside a large moss rose bush as he spoke. It was of sturdy growth, completely covered with buds and blossoms of satiny white deeply embowered in a soft greenery of moss.
"Yes; this is it, father," spoke Beatrice softly. "Uncle Henry had it tended carefully because he knew that you would wish it. Is it not beautiful? I think I love it best of all the roses." She bent over a cluster to inhale its fragrance as she finished speaking.
"It has grown," he said musingly. "It was so small. I should not have known it. I did not think to find so large a bush."
"You have been gone for years," she reminded him. "Have you forgotten, father? A small plant would have time to become a large shrub."
"True;" he said. "True." He broke a half blown bud from the bush and held it for a moment against his lips. "It was her favorite rose," he said, putting it in the buttonhole of his coat.
The gravity of his face softened into tenderness, and his eyes were misty as he leaned over the rose bush. Bee gazed at him longingly. The impulse of her heart was to go to him, slip her hand in his, or to nestle against him caressingly. Had she done so father and daughter must have drawn very close to each other, but something—perhaps delicacy, perhaps shyness, perhaps a certain awe in which she held him—restrained her. Presently he straightened up, turned away from the bush with a sigh, and walked on. Beatrice followed him silently, and the golden opportunity was gone.
"I am hatching the larvæ of the Thecla titus Fabricus from the eggs," he said as they left the garden a little later, "I wish to get the proper plants for them to feed upon."