“I—­I think it’s all right,” he said.

The girl smiled frankly, yet with a dignity in her puzzled air.  “I’m afraid I shall have to be right decided,” she said.  “These roses are private property and I mustn’t let you have them.”

“Oh!” Philip dropped the great bunch of gorgeous color guiltily by his side, but still held tightly the prickly mass of stems, knowing his right, yet half wondering if he could have made a mistake.  He stammered: 

“I thought—­to whom do they belong?”

“They belong to my cousin, Mr. Philip Fairfield Beckwith”—­the sound of his own name was pleasant as the falling voice strayed through it.  “He is coming home in a few days, so I want them to look their prettiest for him—­for his first sight of them.  I take care of this rose garden,” she said, and laid a motherly hand on the nearest flower.  Then she smiled.  “It doesn’t seem right hospitable to stop you, but if you will come over to Westerly, to our house, father will be glad to see you, and I will certainly give you all the flowers you want.”  The sweet and masterful apparition looked with a gracious certainty of obedience straight into Philip’s bewildered eyes.

[Illustration:  “I reckon I shall have to ask you not pick any more of those roses,” a voice said.]

“The boy Shelby!” Many a time in the months after Philip Beckwith smiled to himself reminiscently, tenderly, as he thought of “the boy Shelby” whom he had read into John Fairfield’s letter; “the boy Shelby” who was twenty-two years old and the only child; “the boy Shelby” whom he had blamed with such easy severity for idling at Fairfield; “the boy Shelby” who was no boy at all, but this white flower of girlhood, called—­after the quaint and reasonable Southern way—­as a boy is called, by the surname of her mother’s people.

Toward Westerly, out of the garden of the old time, out of the dimness of a forgotten past, the two took their radiant youth and the brightness of to-day.  But a breeze blew across the tangle of weeds and flowers as they wandered away, and whispered a hope, perhaps a promise; for as it touched them each tall stalk nodded gayly and the box hedges rustled delicately an answering undertone.  And just at the edge of the woodland, before they were out of sight, the girl turned and threw a kiss back to the roses and the box.

“I always do that,” she said.  “I love them so!”

Two weeks later a great train rolled into the Grand Central Station of New York at half-past six at night, and from it stepped a monstrosity—­a young man without a heart.  He had left all of it, more than he had thought he owned, in Kentucky.  But he had brought back with him memories which gave him more joy than ever the heart had done, to his best knowledge, in all the years.  They were memories of long and sunshiny days; of afternoons spent in the saddle, rushing through grassy lanes where trumpet-flowers flamed over gray farm fences, or trotting slowly down white roads; of whole mornings only an hour long, passed in the enchanted stillness of an old garden; of gay, desultory searches through its length and breadth, and in the park that held it, for buried treasure:  of moonlit nights; of roses and June and Kentucky—­and always, through all the memories, the presence that made them what they were, that of a girl he loved.