her color of hyacinths for
table decorations, you never use any white ones. Why is it?"

She looked at her husband. I saw their eyes meet across the table, and
that look told me how near the past was to their thoughts.

"It is a flower I do not care for, Lumley," she said quietly. "The
perfume is too faint. Besides, they are so suggestive of funerals."

"Perhaps you would prefer my not wearing mine, then," I remarked
carelessly. "I will throw them away."

I saw him bite his lip and frown, and I laughed to myself. Lady St.
Maurice was hesitating.

"I should be sorry for you to do that," she said. "Groves can take them
away until after dinner, if you would not mind."

"They are scarcely worth keeping," I went on, drawing them from my
corsage. "I care nothing for them after all," and opening the window
just behind my chair, I threw them into the darkness.

Lord Lumley came to me in the drawing room afterward.

"It was scarcely kind of you to throw my flowers away," he said, bending
over my chair.

I turned back with my hands clasped behind my head and laughed up at
him.

"Why not? They were nothing to me. It was kind to your mother at any
rate."

Oh! hypocrite! hypocrite! If he could only have seen me a few minutes
before, stealing along in the shadow of the shrubs outside looking about
in the darkness till I had found them, and holding them passionately to
my lips. They were in my pocket then, wrapped in a lace handkerchief.
They are in a secret drawer of my desk now, and there will they remain
forever. I do not mind confessing that they are very precious to me. But
he does not know that.

He turned away offended and left me. But I went to the piano and sang a
wild Neapolitan love song, and when I had finished he was leaning over
me with a deep glow in his pale cheeks and his eyes fixed upon mine.
Does he know how handsome he is, I wonder? Whence did I get the strength
to look into those deep blue eyes, burning with passion, and mock at
him?

"You sing divinely of what you know nothing!" he said.

"Isn't that rather a rash assumption?" I answered lightly. "You are
paying me a poor compliment in taking it for granted that I never had a
lover, Lord Lumley."

"Have you?"

"Oh, yes, heaps!"

"Are you engaged, then?" he asked fiercely.

"How like a man you jump at conclusions!"

"But, are you?"

"Is it your business, Lord Lumley?"

"Yes!"

"Then if you make everybody's love affairs your concern,