“Perhaps the beauty of the rose is indeed embodied in the flower you hold in your hand,” he went on. “But the life, the mystery—they are contained in mine! Now that I have clipped it, that beautiful orange blossom has already begun to die. As long as its roots extend deep into the earth, the plant lives and thrives and continues to bear this most wonderful profusion of color. But take it out of the soil, and instantly the life is gone.”

He paused, staring down at his hand.

“Look at it,” he said at length. “What do you see? Nothing but dirt, most would say. Place it on a woman’s dress, or upon the floor of our drawing room, or upon a plate at our dinner table, and we would stare aghast.”

Sabina could not help laughing at the images her father had conjured up in her mind.

“It is even an object of scorn and ridicule. We purge it from our homes and our clothes, and before we eat of the vegetables of your mother’s garden, we carefully wash off all traces of residue of the ground. Curious, is it not, that this low, despised commodity we call dirt should be the transmitter of very life itself to everything that grows on the face of God’s earth?”

“I’ve never thought of that before.”

“God often hides life in the most out-of-the-way, hidden places, even in those things, such as this filthy black soil, that are looked upon with contempt.”

They sat a moment in silence. Then Herr von Dortmann rose, threw the handful of earth back into the hole whence it had come, and said, “Come, Sabina—there’s something else I want to show you.”

She rose, took his arm, and followed him, out of the garden, along the pathway leading down the hill, and toward the fields, now ripening under the blazing summer’s sun.

They walked a short distance amongst the grasses of wheat, then rye. He clipped several heads of each, as she had seen him do dozens of times every year, at each stage of the grain’s development, then led her along the dirt road, around the eastward slope of the knoll, toward the cow barns and animal pens. They made a stop at the chicken shed, where the baron found an egg that had been missed that morning by the kitchen helpers. It was forty minutes later before they were again seated at the bench in the rose garden, both breathing freely and flushed from the heat and the exertion of the climb back up the hill.