“You shouldn’t begin, Mr. Hochenheimer, by spoiling me.”

“Ah, Miss Renie, if you knew how I like to spoil you, if you would let me—­Ach, what’s the use?  I—­I can’t say it like I want.”  She could hear him breathing.  “It—­it’s a grand night, Miss Renie.”

“Yes.”

“Grand!”

“And look over those roofs!  It seems like there’s a million stars shining, don’t it?”

“You’re like me, Miss Renie; so many times I’ve noticed it.  Nothing is so grand to me as nature, neither.”

“Up at Green Springs, in the Ozarks, where we went for ten days last summer, honest, Mr. Hochenheimer, I used to lie looking out the window all night.  The stars up there shone so close it seemed like you could nearly touch them.”

“Ain’t that wonderful, Miss Renie, you should be just like me again!” She smiled in the dark.  “When I was a boy always next to the attic window I liked to sleep.  When I built my house, Miss Renie, the first thing after I designed my rose-garden I drew up for myself a sleeping-garden on my roof.  The architects fussed enough about spoiling the roof-line, but that’s one of the things I wanted which I stood pat for and got—­my sleeping-garden.”

“Sleeping-garden!”

“Miss Renie, I just wish you could see it—­all laid out in roses in summer, and a screened-in pergola, where I sleep, right underneath the stars and roses.  I sleep so close to heaven I always say I can smell it.”

She turned her little face, white as a spray of jasmine against a dark background of night, toward him.  “Underneath a pergola of roses!  I guess it’s the roses you must smell.  How grand!”

“Sometimes when—­if you come to Cincinnati I want to show you my place, Miss Renie.  If I say so myself, I got a wonderful garden; flowers I can show you grown from clippings from every part of the world.  If I do say so, for a sausage-maker who never went to school two years in his life it ain’t so bad.  I got a lily-pond, Miss Renie, they come from all over to see.  By myself I designed it.”

“It must be grand, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home.  You should see my old mother how she fixes for them!  I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women.  In a sausage-factory they don’t get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain.  I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers.  I—­well, I don’t know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself.”

“They like it?”

“Like it!  I tell you it’s the greatest pleasure I get out of my place.  I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden.”

“On such a stylish street they wouldn’t ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“Me and my mother ain’t much for style, Miss Renie.  Honest, you’d be surprised, but with my fine house I don’t even keep an automobile.  My mother, she’s old, Miss Renie, and won’t go in one.  Alone it ain’t no pleasure; and when I don’t walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough.”