Jenny: Flower Garden

She went away inside herself for a moment, and the boy watched her out of the corner of one eye, suspicious, seeing thoughts play idly across her vacant face. Her countenance darkened: was it anger, or regret? Perhaps it was determination. And when she came back, there was a soft darkness about her words which made him think it was a little of all three, and chiefly that she was trying to brush off something she would rather not remember. He had seen that, once, in Master Gaius' face when something had fallen on a patch of cobbles in the cloister yard, a patch overgrown with moss and never tread upon. He had stood there with a sort of pale look about his features, then - he had not known he had been watched - he had snatched up the object and shook one shoulder, as if to shake off a thing in his memory.

"You think that," he said musingly. They had stepped out into the grey, windless aftermath of the rain. By now the thatch was nearly all torn off the Long Barn, and Gaius had sent two boys to haul the sheaves away. He saw Lord Ambrosius standing splay-legged on the roof-beam; his voice came indistinctly but loudly across the distance as he spoke. She thought he was just a boy. Every glance from her told him that. And he did not mind much, because it made his job that much easier; but another part of him, the part that was not just a boy, knew a thing or two, and he sought for an explanation for her.

"You think that... And maybe you're right. And maybe you're wrong. What do you know about fellows, as to that?" And before she could answer, he went on: "It's not so much the sort of noticing as the sort of seeing. You can look at a garden, and you'll notice that there are flowers. Any fellow with his eyes open in his head will notice the flowers. But there will be one flower that he will see. It will stand out to him, and no one will know the difference between the noticing and the seeing but himself."