“Yes, indeed.  Or else you get out a jackknife and hack off great handfuls of them at once, and bring them back all bleeding from your ruthless attack.”

“I see.  And you gather them delicately, so they don’t mind, I suppose.  Yet—­I was given to understand that ‘Susquehanna’ died first.  I’ve always wondered what you did to her.  I’d banked on her as the huskiest of the lot.”

She flashed a quick look at him, compounded of surprise, mirth, and something else whose nature he could not guess. “‘Susquehanna’ was certainly a wonderful rose,” she admitted.

“Yet only next morning she was sadly drooping.  I know, because I received a report of her.  And I lost my wager.”

“You should have known better,” she said demurely, her head bent over her armful of flowers, “than to make a wager on the life of a rose sent to a girl who was just coming back to life herself.”

“You weren’t so gentle with ‘Susquehanna,’ then, I take it, as you are with those wild things you have there.”

“I was not gentle with her at all.”  Anne lifted her head with a mischievously merry look.  “If you must know—­I kissed her—­hard!”

“Ah!” Jordan King sat back, laughing, with suddenly rising colour.  “I thought as much.  But I suppose I’m to take it that you did it solely because she was ’Susquehanna’—­not because—­”

“Certainly because she was her lovely self, cool and sweet and a glorious colour, and she reminded me—­of other roses I had known.  Flowers to a convalescent are only just a little less reviving than food.  ‘Susquehanna’ cheered me on toward victory.”

“Then she died happy, I’m sure.”

He would have enjoyed keeping it up with nonsense of this pleasurable sort, but as soon as Anne was back in the car she somehow turned him aside upon quite different ground, just how he could not tell.  He found himself led on to talk about his work, and he could not discover in her questioning a trace of anything but genuine interest.  No man, however modest about himself, finds it altogether distressing to have to tell a charming girl some of his more exciting experiences.  In the days of his early apprenticeship King had spent many months with a contracting engineer of reputation, who was executing a notable piece of work in a wild and even dangerous country, and the young man’s memory was full of adventures connected with that period.  In contrast with his present work, which was of a much more prosaic sort, it formed a chapter in his history to which it stirred him even yet to turn back, and at Anne’s request he was soon launched upon it.