Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/151

 He came to her the next day, and the next, and every day; and as the weeks went by, and the Atalanta was almost complete, Margaret's laugh was heard again, though more rarely than before. Her voice had grown a trifle deeper and less like the cool babbling of running water than it had been when Philip Rondelet had first known her. Philip was not there to mark the change, for on the very day after his visit to Therese he had been summoned to his home in the country, where his sister lay desperately ill, and in the life-struggle through which he remained at her side he had no moment to return to New Orleans to seek the girl whose image filled his dreams by day as well as by night. He did not write to her, for the only thing he could have said he had not yet the right to say. Mrs. Harden had left New Orleans when Mardi Gras was past, and there was no one to speak about Rondelet to Margaret, who was putting him more and more from her mind as the days went by. Robert Feuardent, who had been his friend from childhood, never mentioned Philip's name to the young sculptor, and so things went on till the time of the roses was come.

The passage of the seasons in that fair southern land is marked by the blossoming of its flowers. The glory of the roses was over all the city. In the gardens of the great houses the queen