Rose was somewhat more puzzled to account for the cheerful passing of the minutes. When she had been a hundred times more gay, which was, upon a fair calculation, some six weeks before, she had often called the hours lazy-footed loiterers; but now they sped on so fast--so fast--she hardly knew that the year was nearly at the end. She was now as much in the garden as her father, her sister, or her uncle. Whenever they were there, she was with them. When they talked to the head-gardener, she talked to him too; and sometimes a merry smile would come upon her warm little lips, of which her companions did not well see the cause. But Rose was seldom in the garden alone--never indeed but at the two stated times of the day when she went to feed her gold-fishes. That she could not help. It must be deeply impressed upon the reader's mind--ay, and reiterated, that from childhood this had been her task; and it was quite impossible that she could abandon it now--at least, so thought Rose.
Every morning, then, and every evening, she visited the little basin, and hung over her glossy favourites for several minutes. Well was she named--for she was like her name--and very seldom has the eye of man beheld anything more fair than Rose Tracy as she looked down upon the water under the shade of the marble dome above: the soft cheek like the heart of a blush rose, the clustering hair falling like moss over her brow, the bending form, graceful as the stem of a flower.
I know not how fate, fortune, or design had arranged it; but so it was, that the hours when Chandos returned to his cottage, either in the morning to breakfast, or in the evening to rest, were always a few minutes after the periods when Rose visited the basin; and his way at either time was sure to lie near that spot. If Emily was with her, as sometimes happened, the head-gardener doffed his hat and passed on. If Rose was alone, Chandos Winslow paused for a time, resumed his station and himself, and enjoyed a few sweet moments of unreserved intercourse with the only person who knew him as he really was.
The strange situation in which they were placed, their former meeting in a brighter scene, the future prospects and intentions of one, at least, of the parties to those short conversations, furnished a thousand subjects apart from all the rest of the world's things, which had the effect that such mutual stores of thought and feeling always have--they drew heart towards heart; and Chandos soon began to feel that there was something else on earth than he had calculated upon to struggle for against the world's frowns.
