grow red resting on my heart."

"When they do I will listen to you."

"Will you, though? It is a promise; when this white rose is red you will
love me?"

"Oh, yes, I can promise that."

"Dear Rosa!" He was very near her as she disentangled an obtruding vine
from her garments, and before she was aware of his purpose he had
audaciously snatched a kiss from her astonished lips.

"You odious Yankee! I haven't words to express my disgust--abhorrence!"

"Don't try, love needs no words: but I'll tell you; let me put this
white rose to your lips; it will turn red at the touch, and in that way
you can take your kiss back, if you really want it; then there'll be a
fair exchange. I--"

"Hello, there! are you two grafting roses?"

It was Wesley, coming from the lower garden, where the stream was
narrowest beyond the high wall of hedge.

"Oh, no, Mr. Boone; Richard here is studying the color in flowers. He
has a theory that eclipses Goethe's 'Farbenlehre.'"

"Oh, indeed!" Wesley was quite unconscious of what Goethe's doctrine of
colors might be, so he prudently avoided urging fuller particulars
regarding Dick's theory, and said, vaguely;

"You have color enough here to theorize on, I'm sure."

"Yes, we have had very satisfactory experiments," Dick assented naively,
stealing a glance at Rosa.

"But quite inconclusive," she rejoined, moving onward, the two young men
following in the penumbra of her wide hat.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A CAMPAIGN OF PLOTS.

Meanwhile, there were curious events passing and coming to pass on the
seven hills upon which the proud young capital of the proud young
Confederacy stood. Rome, in her most imperial days, never dreamed of the
scenic glories that Richmond, like a spoiled beauty, was hardly
conscious of holding as her dower. Indeed, such is the necromantic
mastery of the passion of the beautiful that, once standing on the
glorious hill, that commands the James for twenty miles--twenty miles of
such varied loveliness of color, configuration, and _mis en scene_, that
the purple distances of Naples seem common to it--standing there, I say,
one day, when the sword had long been rusting in the scabbard, and the
memory of those who raised it in revolt had faded from all minds save
those who wanted office--this historian thought that, had it been his
lot to be born in that lovely spot, he, too, would have fought for State
caprices--just as a gallant man will take up the quarrel of beauty,