"
It seemed not unnatural.
"Did you find--any message from me when you came?" she
asked presently, in a quieted, almost a contented tone.
It shot--the message--before his eyes, though he had seen
it no message, in the preoccupation of his arrival.
"I found a rose on my dressing-table," he told her; and
the rose stood for him in a wonder of tenderness, looking
back.
"I smuggled it in," she confessed, "I knew your old
servant--she used to be with us. The others--from Dr
Drummond's--have been there all day making it warm and
comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything like
that, but I had the right, hadn't I, to bring the rose?"
"I don't know," he answered her, hard-pressed, "how we
are to bear this."
She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of
a surgeon's knife.
"We are not to bear it," she said eagerly. "The rose is
to tell you that. I didn't mean it, when I left it, to
be anything more--more than a rose; but now I do. I didn't
even know when I came out tonight. But now I do. We aren't
to bear it, Hugh. I don't want it so--now. I can't--can't
have it so."
She came nearer to him again and caught with her two
hands the lapels of his coat. He closed his own over them
and looked down at her in that half-detachment, which
still claimed and held her.
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