"Yes, Roger."
"Did your mother send it to you?"
"No, I picked it myself. It kept fresh, didn't it, Roger dear?"
"Yes."
He remembered the garden where they had walked side by side, two years earlier—where he had told her of his love.
It was the one splotch of color, the one sign of the joy of life, in the whole drab Massachusetts community, this old garden which the Erskine family had jealously nursed and coddled for generations. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes, scrambling and straining and growing and tangling in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing old stones with hearts of deep ruby and amethyst, building arches of glowing pink and tea-yellow against the pale sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed corners, as if praying.
But he had always liked the scarlet Gloire de Dijon roses best.
They were like her lips.
He looked up.
"What about Dan?" he asked.
