I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a step which we had not contemplated.  I did carry some flowers to Miss La Heu the next day.  I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the counter.  The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering them to the fair person who had sold them to me.  As it was, I did much better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.

They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, “graciously accepted.”  Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her ledger.  She was looking lovely.

“I expected you yesterday,” she said.  “The new Lady Baltimore was ready.”

“Well, if it is not all eaten yet—­”

“Oh, no!  Not a slice gone.”

“Ah, nobody does your art justice here!”

“Go and sit down at your table, please.”

It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it, and I did my best.

“I shall miss my lunches here very much when I’m gone.”

“Did you say coffee to-day?”

“Chocolate.  I shall miss—­”

“And the lettuce sandwiches?”

“Yes.  You don’t realize how much these lunches—­”

“Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.

“You have said it.  They have cost me my—­”

“I can give you the receipt, you know.”

“The receipt?”

“For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”

“You’ll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”

“Oh, his heart!  General, listen to—­” From habit she had turned to where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was mastered.  “Never mind!” she quickly resumed.  “Please don’t speak about it.  And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come in yesterday morning after—­after the bridge.”

“I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.

But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman’s Exchange.

It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn’t bend her head down, she tilted it ever so little up.  It wasn’t new to me, this form of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she did it, as she did everything, with perfection.  Then she turned to Eliza La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.