"It would do you good to make her a visit," said Tulee, "and I should think you might manage to do it somehow."
"No. Gerald said, a good while ago, that it would be dangerous for us ever to go to New Orleans."
"Does he expect to keep you here always?" asked Tulee. "He might just as well keep you in a prison, little bird."
"O, what's the use of talking, Tulee!" exclaimed she, impatiently. "I have no friends to go to, and I must stay here." But, reproaching herself for rejecting the sympathy so tenderly offered, she rose and kissed the black cheek as she added, "Good Tulee! kind Tulee! I am a little homesick; but I shall feel better in the morning."
The next afternoon Gerald and Rosa invited her to join them in a drive round the island. She declined, saying the box that was soon to be sent to Madame was not quite full, and she wanted to finish some more articles to put in it. But she felt a longing for the fresh air, and the intense blue glory of the sky made the house seem prison-like. As soon as they were gone, she took down her straw hat and passed out, swinging it by the strings. She stopped on the lawn to gather some flame-colored buds from a Pyrus Japonica, and, fastening them in the ribbons as she went, she walked toward her old familiar haunts in the woods.
It was early in February, but the warm sunshine brought out a delicious aroma from the firs, and golden garlands of the wild jasmine, fragrant as heliotrope, were winding round the evergreen thickets, and swinging in flowery festoons from the trees. Melancholy as she felt when she started from the cottage, her elastic nature was incapable of resisting the glory of the sky, the beauty of the earth, the music of the birds, and the invigorating breath of the ocean, intensified as they all were by a joyful sense of security and freedom, growing out of the constraint that had lately been put upon her movements. She tripped along faster, carolling as she went an old-fashioned song that her father used to be often humming:—
"Begone, dull care!
I prithee begone from me!
Begone, dull care!
Thou and I shall never agree!"
The walk changed to hopping and dancing, as she warbled various snatches from ballets and operas, settling at last upon the quaint little melody, "Once on a time there was a king," and running it through successive variations.
A very gentle and refined voice, from behind a clump of evergreens, said, "Is this Cinderella coming from the ball?"
She looked up with quick surprise, and recognized a lady she had several times seen in Nassau.