Sylvie passed softly into her own chamber, took off her outside things, and returned with careful steps through her mother’s room to the hall, and into the library, to find a book which she wanted.

On the table, at the side which had come of late to be considered hers, lay an express parcel directed to herself.  She knew the writing,—­the capital “S” made with a quick, upward, slanting line, and finished with a swell and curl upon itself like a portly figure “5” with the top-pennant left off; the round sweep after final letters,—­the “t’s” crossed backward from their roots, and the stroke stopped short like a little rocket just in poise of bursting.  She knew it all by heart, though she had never received but one scrap of it before,—­the card that had been tied to the ivy-plant, with Rodney Sherrett’s name and compliments.

She had heard nothing now of Rodney for two months.  She was glad to be alone to wonder at this, to open it with fingers that trembled, to see what he could possibly have put into it for her.

Within the brown wrapper was a square white box.  Up in the corner of its cover was a line of writing in the same hand; the letters very small, and a delicate dash drawn under them.  How neatly special it looked!

“A message from the woods for ‘Sylvia.’”

She lifted it off, as if she were lifting it from over a thought that it concealed, a something within all, that waited for her to see, to know.

Inside,—­well, the thought was lovely!

It was a mid-winter wreath; a wreath of things that wait in the heart of the woodland for the spring; over which the snows slowly gather, keeping them like a secret which must not yet be told, but which peeps green and fresh and full of life at every melting, in soft sunny weather, such as comes by spells beforehand; that must have been gathered by somebody who knew the hidden places and had marked them long ago.

It was made of clusters, here and there, of the glossy daphne-like wintergreen, and most delicate, tiny, feathery plumes of princess-pine; of stout, brave, constant little shield-ferns and spires of slender, fine-notched spleenwort, such as thrust themselves up from rough rock-crevices and tell what life is, that though the great stones are rolled against the doors of its sepulchre, yet finds its way from the heart of things, somehow, to the light.  Mitchella vines, with thread-like, wandering stems, and here and there a gleaming scarlet berry among small, round, close-lying waxy leaves; breaths of silvery moss, like a frosty vapor; these flung a grace of lightness over the closer garlanding, and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated soft gray lichen.

A message.  Yes, it was a simple thing, an unostentatious remembrance; no breaking, surely, of his father’s conditions.  Rodney loyally kept away and manfully stuck to his business, but every spire and frond and leaf of green in this winter wreath shed off the secret, magnetic meaning with which it was charged.  Heart-light flowed from them, and touching the responsive sensitivity, made photographs that pictured the whole story.  It was a fuller telling of what the star-leaved ferns had told before.