In the Garden
Nuova already loved the garden, although so far she had not been in it; at least not been any more in it than standing on the entrance platform of the hive and looking into it from this vantage-ground. But now she was really to go out into it, and sad and tired though she was, she felt a little thrill of happiness as she thought of what she might see over there beyond the near-by bushes, out there among the brilliant flowers and the lush grasses. She turned to Saggia gratefully.
"Good-bye, dear Saggia," she said gently. "I am going to go into the garden now. I will make the little flights first as you told me, so as to be able to find my way back to the hive—but, I don't know, Saggia, I don't feel like ever coming back to the hive." Her eyes filled with tears. "He—he will never come back. He will win, and he will—will die." She shuddered and nearly collapsed again.
Saggia could say nothing. She believed, too, that Hero would win in the Great Courting Chase. And if he won, he would die. It was really, she thought with some anger, a very stupid sort of arrangement; very unfair to the King; to be crowned because he was the finest, strongest, and swiftest drone in the hive, or in any of the other near-by hives whose drones also joined in any Courting Chase they noticed going on, only to die at once. It was simply not only stupid; it was brutal.
She did not like to think of Nuova's going off alone into the garden so soon. And she could not put out of her mind the uneasy feeling that Nuova would never come back to the hive at all; not even as a forager who might go out and in as she pleased. Nuova had too plainly shown that her interest in living was gone, and her surrender to her impulses of the moment was likely at any time to be complete even though it might lead to death itself. Saggia decided that she and Beffa were needed in the garden. As Nuova left her to go to the edge of the platform for her first flights, Saggia scurried off in search of Beffa.
A number of bees were busy at a little group of flowers in the garden when one of them, Uno, who had just turned around facing the general direction of the hive, suddenly uttered an exclamation.
"Well, of all things!" she said. "Beffa in the garden!" The other bees turned and stared.