aintance, perhaps, with the heavily perfumed
atmosphere of conservatories.

"I don't know what you are trying to make me out," Winthrop had
answered, laughing.

"I make you out a very good fellow," replied the lady. "But you are like
my husband (who is also a very good fellow); he wonders how I can go to
the theatre, plays are so artificial. I suppose they are artificial; but
I notice that it required his closest--I may almost say his
nightly--attention for something like fifteen years to find it out."

Winthrop happened to think of this little conversation--he knew not
why--as he followed his guide through her green-walled path, which had
now become so narrow that he could no longer walk by her side. As it
came up in his mind he said to himself that here was a tea-rose, growing
if not quite in the seclusion of untrodden forests where the wild
flowers have their home, then at least in natural freedom, in the pure
air and sunshine, under the open sky. There was--there could be--nothing
of the conservatory, nothing artificial, in the only life Edgarda Thorne
had known, the life of this remote southern village where she had been
born and brought up. Her knowledge of the world outside was--must
be--confined to the Spanish-tinted legends of the slumberous little
community, to the limited traditions of her mother's small experience,
and to the perceptions and fancies of her own imagination; these last,
however numerous they might be in themselves, however vivid, must leave
her much in the condition of a would-be writer of dramas who has never
read a play nor seen one acted, but has merely evolved something vaguely
resembling one from the dreaming depths of his own consciousness;
Garda's idea of the world beyond the barrens must be equally vague and
unreal. And then, as he looked at her, sweet-natured and indifferent,
walking onward with her indolent step over her own land, under the low
blue sky, it came over him suddenly that probably she had not troubled
herself to evolve anything, to think much of any world, good or bad,
outside of her own personality. And he said to himself that wherever she
was would be world enough for most men. In which class, however, he
again did not include Evert Winthrop.

The path made a sudden turn, and stopped. It had brought them to the
borders of a waste.

"This was one of the sugar fields," said Garda, with her little air of
uninterested proprietorship.

Two old roads, raised on embank