“Away into the dining-room and see what it is,” said Mrs. Melville, coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand.  She had put on her brighter shawl, the tartan one.

“You look as we’d been left a fortune,” said Ellen.

“No fear of that.  If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred pounds that’s all we can expect.  But there’s something fine waiting for you.  Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come.  Now!”

She flung open the door.

“Roses!” breathed Ellen.  “Mother—­roses!”

On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars.  Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother’s neck and kissed her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her.  The flowers were beautiful in so many ways.  They were beautiful just as roses, because “roses” is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that dropped through the starlight from the moon.  And these were the furled, attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.

They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.

They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers.  They were an outburst of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very enjoyably if one had the money to buy things.  It really was worth while struggling to get on....

“Mother, where did they come from?”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Melville waggishly.

“Och, tell me!  I don’t imagine you went out and pawned the family jewels.  Och, do tell me!  Come on!”

“A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist’s, this morning.  I could have fallen down when I opened the door.  And the wee brat of a boy tried to convey to me that he wasn’t used to coming to such a place.  He wore a look like a missionary in Darkest Africa.  They were left for Miss Melville, mind you.  Not for your poor old mother.  And they’re from Mr. Yaverland.  Yon’s his card sticking up against your grandmother on the mantelpiece.”