Several days had passed, and there had been no answer to the note.  She had not really expected an answer, but she had thought he might come in.

He came in now, with a great parcel in his arms.  He was a picturesque figure in an enveloping cape and a soft hat pulled down over his gray hair, and with white flakes powdered over his shoulders.

“Good morning, Miss Bridges,” he said; “did you think I was never coming?”

His manner of assuming that she had expected him quite took Emily’s breath away.  “I am glad you came,” she said, simply.  “It is rather dreary, with the snow, and this morning I found my cyclamen frozen on the shelf.”

He glanced up at it.  “We have other flowers,” he said, and, with a sure sense of the dramatic effect, untied the string of his parcel.

Then there was revealed to Miss Emily’s astonished eyes not the flowers that she had expected, but four small plush elephants, duplicates in everything but size of the one she had loaned to Ulrich, and each elephant carried on his back a fragrant load of violets cunningly kept fresh by a glass tube hidden in his trappings.

“There,” said Ulrich Stoelle, “my father sent them.  It is his taste, not mine—­but I knew that you would understand.”

“But,” Miss Emily gasped, “did he make them?”

“Most certainly.  With his clever old fingers—­and he will make as many more as you wish.”

Thus came white elephants back to Miss Emily’s shelves.  “It seems almost too good to be true,” she said, sniffing the violets and smiling at him.

“Nothing is too good to be true,” he told her, “and now I have something to ask.  That you will come and see my father.”

“With pleasure.”

He glanced around the empty shop.  “Why not now?  There are no customers—­and the gray light makes things dreary—.  And it is spring in my hothouses—­there are a thousand cyclamens for the one you have lost, a thousand violets for every one on the backs of these little elephants—­narcissus and daffodils—.  Why not?”

Why not, indeed?  Why not, when Adventure beckoned, go to meet it?  She had tied herself for so many years to the commonplace and the practical.

And so Miss Emily closed her shop, and went in Ulrich’s car, leaving a card tucked in the shop door, “Will reopen at three.”

It was at one o’clock that Dr. McKenzie came and found that door shut against him.  He shook the knob with some impatience, and stamped his foot impotently when no one answered.  His orders had come and he must leave for France tomorrow.  He had not told Jean, he had come to Emily to ask her to break the news—.

He stood there in the snow feeling quite unexpectedly forlorn.  Heretofore he had always been able to put his finger on Emily when he had wanted her.  He had needed only to beckon and she had followed.