“Thank you,” she said warmly. “Will you have a lily?”
“No, lilies are not for me. Briers and thorns grow for me.”
“Where are you riding to now?”
“Felix Harrison came home yesterday worse than ever. I was there in the night and am going again. Why don’t he die now that he has a chance? Catch me throwing away such an opportunity.”
“I hope that you will never have such an opportunity,” she answered, not thinking of what she was saying.
“That’s always the way; the lucky ones die, the unlucky ones live.”
“Can you not resist the temptation to tell me any thing so trite as that?”
“Don’t be sharp, Mystic.”
She was leaning against the low fence, her hands folded over each other, a breath of air stirring the wavy hair around her temples, and touching the pale blue ribbon at her throat, a white, graceful figure, speaking in her animated way with the flush of the pink rose tinting her cheeks and a misty veil shadowing her eyes.
“A very pretty picture in a frame-work of brown and green,” thought the old man in the rustic chair on the piazza.