Ena was glad when she saw Eileen wearing the orchid that Petro had bought for her in the gorgeous new department at the Hands.  Rags had at the same time purchased some gardenias for Miss Rolls, she having mentioned that the gardenia was her favourite flower.  Both girls tucked these trophies into the front of their coats, and wore them home.  Also, they wore them again for dinner, a far more conspicuous compliment to the givers.  Ena meant it to be taken as such, and faintly hoped, in spite of the afternoon’s failure, that the thing she prayed for might happen that night.  Perhaps Lord Raygan needed a little more encouragement, for, after all, she was rich and he was poor, and men did hesitate about proposing to heiresses—­in novels.

Nothing did happen; but there was still time, for the guests were staying on for a cotillon, and there was a meeting at which Lady Raygan had faithfully promised to speak.  It was a shame, however, that the effect of the orchid as well as the gardenias should be wasted, and the morning after their visit to the Hands, Ena made an opportunity of speaking to Petro alone.

He was in his own “den,” one of the smallest rooms in the house, meant for a dressing-room, and opening off his bedroom.  He had fitted it up as a nondescript lair, and indulged in ribald mirth if Ena tried to dignify it with the name of “study.”  All the pictures of the big animals he hadn’t killed were there—­beautiful wild things he felt he had the right to know socially, as he had never harmed them or their most distant relatives.  In an old glass-fronted, secretary bookcase of mahogany, the first piece of “parlour furniture” his parents had ever bought, were the dear books of Petro’s boyhood and early youth, and above, on the gray-papered wall, hung a portrait of mother, which her son had had painted by an unfashionable artist as a “birthday present from his affectionate self” at the age of sixteen.  An ancient easy chair and a queer old sofa still had the original, slippery, black horsehair off which Petro and Ena had slid as children.  Petro had named the sofa “the whale,” and the squat chair “the seal.”  Both shiny, slippery, black things really did resemble sea monsters, and had never lost for Petro their mysterious personality.

There were some cushions and a fire screen, the bead-and-wool flowers of which mother had worked in early married life, and on the floor, in front of the friendly wood fire which Petro loved, lay a rug which was also her handiwork It was made of dresses her children had worn when they were very, very little, and some of her own which Petro could even now remember.  Nobody save he, at Sea Gull Manor, cared for a grate fire; or if mother would have liked one, instead of a handwrought bronze radiator half hidden in the wall, she dared not say so.  But she came and sat in Petro’s den sometimes, crocheting in the old easy chair, when he was self indulgent enough to have a fire of ships’ logs.  The rose and gold and violet flames of the driftwood lit up for him the secret way to Dreamland and the country of Romance.  What it did for mother, she did not say; but as her fingers moved, regularly as the ticking of a clock, her eyes would wander over the old furniture she had loved and back to the fire, as if she were trying to call up her own past and her son’s future.