gaudy quill, floating among the soapsuds of the lavoirs. The white-spiked chestnuts clad in tender green, vibrated with the hum of bees. Shoddy butterflies flaunted their winter rags among the heliotrope. There was a smell of fresh earth in the air, an echo of the woodland brook in the ripple of the Seine, and swallows soared and skimmed among the anchored river craft. Somewhere in a window, a caged bird was singing its heart out to the sky.
Selby looked at the cabbage-rose and then at the sky. Something in the song of the caged bird may have moved him, or perhaps it was that dangerous sweetness in the air of May.
At first he was hardly conscious that he had stopped, then he was scarcely conscious why he had stopped, then he thought he would move on, then he thought he wouldn’t, then he looked at Rue Barrée.
The gardener said; “Mademoiselle, this is undoubtedly a fine pot of pansies.”
Rue Barreé shook her head.
The gardener smiled. She evidently did not want the pansies. She had bought many pots of pansies there, two or three every spring, and never argued. What did she want then? The pansies were evidently a feeler toward a more important transaction. The gardener rubbed his hands and gazed about him.
“These tulips are magnificent,” he observed, “and these hyacinths———” He fell into a trance at the mere sight of the scented thickets.
“That,” murmured Rue, pointing to a splendid rose-bush with her furled parasol, but in spite of her, her voice trembled a little. Selby noticed it, more shame to him that he was listening, and the gardener noticed it, and,
