Page:Rowland--In the shadow.djvu/80

 line beauty. For, when Leyden spoke, the light of his brilliant intellect shone through his clear eyes and his thoughts went home to the listener as if driven on the cold, blue point of a rapier. Virginia was conscious of a sympathy amounting almost to self-obliteration. She was one of those women who are the spoil of the strongest; she might have loved Giles, but a man like Leyden, virile, forceful, gently masterful, could have made her his slave. Virginia was strongest in the face of her enemies.

They reached the greenhouses and found the gardener, a Breton imported by Sir Henry from a château famous for its culture of peaches, busily taking temperatures.

"Guijon," said Sir Henry, "this gentleman believes that he can tell us the name of our strange orchid."

The gardener scowled. "It is a waste of the gentleman's time," he replied in guttural English. He was a crabbed, sour-visaged man, with a barrel chest, bent spine, and very bowed legs. For years his position had hung in the balance; an equivalence between high professional skill and lacking respect. "There is no such plant as this; it is a freak, the sport of nature, a bulb dropped by accident through a hole in the basket and possessing a strange form as the result of unnatural conditions. I have hunted through the plates in the library in London; I have shown the rather poor photograph of it which you took, accurately colored by myself, to savants in the Botanical Gardens. There is no such plant; I think that I shall call it the Phælenopsis Guijonis." He scowled, but this was his habitual expression. No one had ever surprised a trace of amiability 70