“You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“All our lives, Miss Renie, we’ve been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt—­like children got to be learnt to walk—­how to enjoy ourselves.  We—­we need somebody young—­somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie—­young and so pretty, and full of life, and—­and so sweet.”

She gave a gauzy laugh.  “Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live.”

“I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left—­white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica.  It’s a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it’s ready to set.”

“And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer; I—­”

“Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if—­if you’ll excuse me.  I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like ’em to be related.  Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a—­a few little soft thorns on the stem.”

“Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain’t got thorns.”

Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer.  “It’s thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you’re so pretty and sweet, and—­and seem so far away from a—­plain fellow like me.”

“I—­”

“I’m a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don’t know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but—­but I feel, all-righty.”

“Looks ain’t everything.”

“I tell you, Miss Renie, now since I can afford it, I just don’t seem to know how to do the things I got the feeling inside of me for.  Even in my grand house sometimes I feel like it—­it’s too late for me to live like I feel.”

“Nothing’s ever too late, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“Just since I met you I can feel that way, Miss Renie, if you’ll excuse me for saying it—­just since I met you.”

“Me?”

“For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling from a girl that, for me, life—­maybe my life—­is just beginning.  Like a vine, Miss Renie, you got yourself tangled round my feelings.”

“Oh, Mr. Hochenheimer!”

“Like I told your papa to-night on the car, I ’ain’t got much to offer a beautiful young girl like you; money, I can see, don’t count for so much with a fine girl like you, and I—­I don’t need to be told that my face and my ways ain’t my fortune.”

“It’s the heart that counts, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“If—­if you mean that, Miss Renie—­if love, just love, can bring happiness, I can make for you a life as beautiful as my rose-garden.  For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling I can do that for a woman—­and that woman is you.  I—­Will you—­will you be my wife, Miss Renie?” She could feel his breath now, scorching her cheek.  “Will you, Miss Renie?”