“O no!  I am a woman, you see, and I only hold my rose tightly in my fingers and smile in spite of the pricks as if to convince the world that my rose has no thorns.”

“Is that honest?”

“Perhaps not—­but—­yes, I think it is!  If one really loves a rose, you see, one forgets that it has thorns—­really forgets!”.

“Until too late!”

But there was some undercurrent of hidden meaning even in this subject, and Paul tried another.

He asked her about the books she had read since they parted and told her of his travels.  He painted for her a picture of the little cabin on the western prairie, with its man and its woman and its baby, and she listened with a strange softness in her eyes.  He felt that she understood.

There was a tiny lake in the garden, and they sat upon the shore and looked into the water, at an unaccountable loss for words.  At last Paul, with a boyish laugh, relieved the situation by rolling up his sleeve and dabbling for pebbles in the sand at the bottom.

There was not much said—­only a word now and then, but both, in spite of their consciousness of the barrier between them, were rejoicing in the fact that they were together, while Paul, happy in his new-born resolution, was singing in his heart.

Should he tell her now?

He looked up quickly.

“Opal,” he said, “you knew I would come.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because—­I love you!”

The girl tried to laugh away the serious import of his tone.

“I am not looking for men to love me, Paul,” she said.

“No, that’s the trouble.  You never have to.”

He turned away again and for a few moments had no other apparent aim in life than a careful scrutiny of the limpid water.

Somehow he felt a chill underlying her most casual words to-day.  What had become of the freemasonry between them they had both so readily recognized on shipboard?

Just then Gilbert Ledoux and his wife strolled into the garden.  They were genuinely pleased to see Paul and insisted on keeping him for luncheon.  The conversation drifted to his western trip and other less personal things and not again did he have an opportunity to talk alone with Opal.

Paul took his departure soon after, promising to return for dinner, and to bring Verdayne with him.  Then, he resolved to himself, he would tell Opal why he had come.  Then he would claim her as his wife—­his queen!

* * * * *

And Paul kept his word.

That evening they found themselves alone in a deep-recessed window facing the dimly-lighted street.

“Opal,” said Paul, “do you know why I have come to New Orleans?  Can’t you imagine, dear?”

She instantly divined the tenor of his thoughts, and shook her head in a tremor of sudden fright.

“I have come to tell you that I have fought it all out and that I cannot live without you.  Though I am breaking my plighted troth, I ask you to become my wife!”