A little boy sat by himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside.

Here was another rose blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood.

How had she come there, that beautiful child-woman in the solitude?
By what caprice of the strange law of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this particular waste place of the earth ?--for her face had surely come a long way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful things.

Could she be a plain farmer's daughter, indigenous to that stubborn soil?
No, surely she was not that, and yet--how had she come to be there?
But these were questions we could not put to the schoolmarm.
We could only ask our road, and the prosaic possibilities of lunch in the neighbourhood, and go on our way.

Nor could I press that rose among the pages of my book--but, as I write, I wonder if it is still making sweet that desolate spot, and still studying irrelevant geography in the silence of the hills.
However, we did learn something about our young human rose at a farmhouse a mile or so farther on.