When dinner was done and everything cleared up, or rather Julia's part, she took Joost into the garden.
"Now," she said in Dutch, "let us come out and talk and look at things."
They went out and he began to admire her orderly garden and to tell her why this plant had done well and that one had failed. He did not speak of the blue daffodil, he thought he could better ask about that a little later. She did not speak of it either by name; he and it were so inseparably connected in her mind.
"Come along," she said, when he stopped to look into a tulip to see if its centre was as truly black as it should have been. "Come and see it."
He followed her obediently, but asked what it was he was to see.
"The blue daffodil, of course," she said.
He stopped dead. "You have got it here?" he exclaimed. "You have not sold it?"
"Certainly not."
"But why—why?" he stared at her in amazement. "You wanted money, it was for that you wanted the bulb, to sell; you told me so. Do you not want money now?"
"Oh, yes," Julia said; "but that is an incurable disease hereditary in our family."