d from the earth and clouded all the glass, and the moist air was
heavy with the breath of heliotropes and roses. A number of butterflies
were flying about, and at the end of a many-colored perspective of
leaves and blossoms Putnam saw Miss Pinckney hovering around a
collection of tropical orchids. The gardener had passed on into an
adjoining hot-house, and no sound broke the quiet but the dripping of
water in a tank of aquatic plants. The fans of the palms and the long
fronds of the tree-ferns hung as still as in some painting of an Indian
isle.

She greeted him with a smile and held out her hand to him. The beauty of
the morning and of the place had wrought in her a gentle intoxication,
and the mournful nature of her errand was for the moment forgotten.
"Isn't it delicious here?" she exclaimed: "I think I should like to live
in a green-house and grow like a plant."

"A little of that kind of thing would do you no end of good," he
replied--"a little concentrated sunshine and bright colors and the smell
of the fresh earth, you know. If you were my patient, I would make you
take a course of it. I'd say you wanted more vegetable tissue, and
prescribe a green-house for six months. I've no doubt this man here
would take you. A young-lady apprentice would be quite an attractive
feature. You could pull off dead leaves and strike graceful attitudes,
training up vines, like the gardener's daughter in Tennyson."

"What are those gorgeous things?" she asked, pointing to a row of
orchids hung on nails along the wall.

"Those are epiphytic orchids--air-plants, you know: they require no
earth for their roots: they live on the air."

"Like a chameleon?"

"Like a chameleon."

He took down from its nail one of the little wooden slabs, and showed
her the roots coiled about it, with the cluster of bulbs. The flower was
snow-white and shaped like a butterfly. The fringe of the lip was of a
delicate rose-pink, and at the base of it were two spots of rich maroon,
each with a central spot of the most vivid orange. Every color was as
pronounced as though it were the only one.

"What a daring combination!" she cried. "If a lady should dress in all
those colors she'd be thought vulgar, but somehow it doesn't seem vulgar
in a flower."

She turned the blossom over and looked at the under side of the petals.
"Those orange spots show right through the leaf," she went on, "as if
they were painted and the paint laid on thick."

"Do you k