-except your roses."

"There you touched father in two tender spots. He cultivates both."

"Really? Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?"

Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had
been looking so long at him.

"Ah, I have," said Mavering gallantly.

"Does he often do it?" asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.

Dan answered for him. "He never had such a chance before."

Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to
take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice
that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of
the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants
growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in
their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in
the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch
flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from
which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid.
It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was
part of Elbridge Mavering's pleasure in this feature of his place.
Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked
anything with her whole heart, it was an effect, and she traversed the
half-bubble by its pebbled path, showering praises right and left with
a fulness and accuracy that missed no detail, while Alice followed
silently, her hand in Minnie Mavering's, and cold with suppressed
excitement. The rose-house was divided by a wall, pierced with frequent
doorways, over which the trees were trained and the roses hung; and on
either side were ranks of rare and costly kinds, weighed down with bud
and bloom. The air was thick with their breath and the pungent odours of
the rich soil from which they grew, and the glass roof was misted with
the mingled exhalations.

Mr. Mavering walked beside Alice, modestly explaining the difficulties
of rose culture, and his method of dealing with the red spider. He had a
stout knife in his hand, and he cropped long, heavy-laden stems of roses
from the walls and the beds, casually giving her their different names,
and laying them along his arm in a massive sheaf.

Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice had gone forward with Dan, and were waiting for
them at the thither end of the rose-house.

"Alice! just imagine: the grapery is beyond this," cried the girl's
mother.