'I do not wonder Mr. Falkirk gives no help,' said Rollo, a little quizzically.
'Will you try Primrose's expedient, my dear?' said Dr. Maryland, very benignly. 'Half your requisition you will certainly find. Whether you can love us, I don't know; but there's no knowing without trying.'
She gave one of her sweet childish looks of answer to both the first and last speaker; but Mr. Rollo was favoured with a small reproof.
'You must not speak so of Mr. Falkirk,' she said. 'He has been the kindest possible friend to me. And I think he loves me wonderfully, considering how I have tried his patience. Just think what it is for a grave, quiet, grown-up, sensible man, to have the plague of a girl like me! Very few men would stand it at all, Mr. Roll; but Mr. Falkirk never said a rough word to me in his life.'
She was so grave, so innocent, so ignorant in it all, the effect was indescribably funny.
'I should think very few men would stand it,' said Rollo, composedly; but Primrose and her father smiled.
'Mr. Falkirk is an admirable man,' said Dr. Maryland. 'You are a good witness for him, Hazel.'
'If I would only do all he wants me to!' she said with a slight shake of the head. 'But I cannot, and he says I don't know what I want. But Dr. Maryland—all the nice, proper people I have ever seen, live on such a dead level—it would kill me. They think dancing is wrong, and Italian a loss of time, and "it's a pity to waste my young years upon German." And they can't talk of a book, but some life of a missionary who was eaten by cannibals,—I was very sorry he went there, to be sure, but that didn't make me want to hear about it, nor to go myself. They are just like peach trees trimmed up and nailed to a wall, and I'd rather be wild Wych Hazel in the woods, though it's of no sort of use, and nobody cares for it!' Dr. Maryland might guess from this frank out-pouring, how seldom it was that the stream of young thoughts found such an exit, how complete was the trust which called it forth. She had quite forgotten her tea. And the doctor forgot his; and bent his gray head towards her brown one.
'But suppose, my dear,' (how different this from Mr. Falkirk's 'my dear,')—'suppose the bush were a conscious thing; and suppose that while it remained in the woods and remained entirely itself, it could yet by being submitted to some sweet influence be made so fragrant that its influence should be known all through the forest; and its nuts, instead of being wild, useless things, should every one of them bring a gift of healing or of life to the hands that should gather them? I would rather it should stay in the woods;—and I never think anything trained against a wall is as good as that which has the sun all round it.'
Wych Hazel looked at him with no sort of doubt in her eyes that he had been "submitted to some sweet influence." And perhaps it was the image he had drawn, that brought a little tremour round her lips, as she answered: