him to the chosen spot and showed him the plant--a bunch of
long narrow leaves rising from the brown earth, and in the midst of
them a single stalk supporting a partly opened flower. In shape it was
single, like the common wild blossom, only much bigger; but in
colour, not blue as was expected, but streaked in irregular unblended
stripes of pure yellow and pure blue. The marking was as hard and
unshaded as that of the old-fashioned brown and yellow tulips which
children call bulls'-eyes, and the effect, though bizarre, was not at
all pretty. Julia did not think it so, and she did not expect any one
else to either; but Joost, when he saw the streaky flower, gave a
little inarticulate exclamation and, dropping on his knees on the
path, lifted the bell reverently so that he might look into it.

"Ah!" he said softly; "ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!" He looked up,
and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot
that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man
kneeling on a garden path reverently worshipping a striped flower. It
was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated
admiration for the new and strange; it was the love of a man for his
work and appreciation of success in it, even if the success were
another's; also, perhaps, in part, the expression of a deep-seated
national feeling for flowers.

"Is it what you wished?" Julia asked gently, conscious that she was,
as always, a long way off from Joost.

"I did not wish it," he said, "because I did not foresee it. No one
could foresee that it would come, though it always might. It is a
novelty, an accident of nature perhaps, but beautiful, wonderful!"

"Is it a real novelty?" Julia asked. "Just as much as your first blue
daffodil was? Oh, I am glad! Then you have two now."

"I?" Joost said in surprise. "No, not I; this is yours, not mine; you
have grown it."

"That's nothing," Julia returned easily; "you gave me the bulb; it is
really your bulb; I only just put it into the ground, I have had
nothing to do with the novelty."

But if she thought to dispose of the matter in that way she soon found
she was mistaken; there were apparently laws governing bulb growing
which were as inviolable as any governing hereditary titles. The man
who bloomed the bulb was the man who had produced the novelty--if
novelty it was; he could no more make over his rights to another than
a duke could his coronet. In vain Julia protested