There was many a chasm, however, among the finest shoots produced by Luciana’s wild ways, for which she had to console the gardener, and the symmetry of many a leafy coronet was destroyed.  She tried to encourage him to hope that it would all be soon restored again, but he had too deep a feeling, and too pure an idea of the nature of his business, for such grounds of comfort to be of much service to him.  Little as the gardener allowed himself to have his attention dissipated by other tastes and inclinations, he could the less bear to have the peaceful course interrupted which the plant follows toward its enduring or its transient perfection.  A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.  A calm eye, a silent method, in all seasons of the year, and at every hour, to do exactly what has then to be done, is required of no one perhaps more than of a gardener.  These qualities the good man possessed in an eminent degree, and it was on that account that Ottilie liked so well to work with him; but for some time past he had not found himself able to exercise his peculiar talent with any pleasure to himself.  Whatever concerned the fruit-gardening or kitchen-gardening, as well as whatever had in time past been required in the ornamental gardens, he understood perfectly.  One man succeeds in one thing, another in another; he succeeded in these.  In his management of the orangery, of the bulbous flowers, in budding shoots and growing cuttings from the carnations and auriculas, he might challenge nature herself.  But the new ornamental shrubs and fashionable flowers remained in a measure strange to him.  He had a kind of shyness of the endless field of botany, which had been lately opening itself, and the strange names humming about his ears made him cross and ill-tempered.  The orders for flowers which had been made by his lord and lady in the course of the past year, he considered so much useless waste and extravagance—­all the more, as he saw many valuable plants disappear, and as he had ceased to stand on the best possible terms with the nursery gardeners, who, he fancied, had not been serving him honestly.

Consequently, after a number of attempts, he had formed a sort of a plan, in which Ottilie encouraged him the more readily because its first essential condition was the return of Edward, whose absence in this, as in many other matters, every day had to be felt more and more seriously.

Now that the plants were ever striking new roots, and putting out their shoots, Ottilie felt herself even more fettered to this spot.  It was just a year since she had come there as a stranger, as a mere insignificant creature.  How much had she not gained for herself since that time! but, alas! how much had she not also since that time lost again!  Never had she been so rich, and never so poor.  The feelings of her loss and of her gain alternated momentarily one with another, chasing each other through her heart; and she could find no other means to help herself, except always to set to work again at what lay nearest to her, with such interest and eagerness as she could command.