says, with a sudden, swift, jealous glance out of his brown eyes that makes my cheeks paler than ever.
I do not answer, and in another minute we are in Silvia's rose garden.
It is the month of roses, and this corner is a very feast of roses. From lily white to faintest cream-colour and amber and yellow, they melt by every exquisite gradation into richer, fuller tints, fainting away in voluptuous crimson and purple, paling from seashell pink to flesh-colour. How they mock at our narrow human capacity for enjoyment! How they fill the soul with one drenching, glorious wave of delight, and overflow it, only to be filled again and again!
"I always was so fond of roses," I say, nervously, as I lift my face out of a great golden splendour, with a breath as sweet as its own fairness. "Some people like lilies best, but I do not; they have only one scent, only one face always, and the rose has so many!"
"If you were dying," he says, "and had to choose the flowers to be laid in your coffin, which would you have?"
"Roses! I should like to be smothered in them! Don't you think dead people know the flowers are there, and smell them? I am sure I should. What made you think of my dying? You forget that I was always a coward about that."
"I had not forgotten . . . but a strange thought was passing through my mind . . . of how some people get their flowers in life and some in death, and of how cursed is the man who causes the life's flowers of another to wither."
"Only," I say, gently, "it is God who sends the blight, not man."
I look round, Silvia and George have vanished; there is no one here but Paul and I.
"You will allow me to give you a bunch of your favourites," he says.
