“I wish I might think so.  I’d be there now if I weren’t bound.”

“It won’t hurt either of you to wait until I come back,” was the Doctor’s ultimatum, and Derry, longing for sympathy, left him presently and made his way to the Toy Shop.

“If we were to wait ten years do you think I’d love her any more than I do now?” he demanded of Emily.  “I should think he’d understand.”

“Men never do understand,” said Emily—­“fathers.  They think their own romance was unique, or they forget that there was ever any romance.”

“If you could put in a word for us,” ventured Derry.

“I am not sure that it would do any good; Bruce is a Turk.”

A customer came, and Derry lingered disconsolately while Emily served her.  More customers, among them a tall spare man with an upstanding bush of gray hair.  He had a potted plant in his arms, wrapped in tissue paper.  He set it on the counter and went away.

When Miss Emily discovered the plant, she asked Derry, “Who put it there?”

Derry described the man.  “You were busy.  He didn’t stop.”

The plant was a cyclamen, blood-red and beautiful.

Miss Emily managed to remark casually that she had loaned his father an elephant, perhaps he had felt that he ought to make some return—­but he needn’t—.

“An elephant?”

“Not a real one.  But the last of my plush beauties.”

She set the cyclamen on a shelf, and wrapped up the parcel of toys which Derry had bought the day before, “I may as well take them to Margaret Morgan’s kiddies,” he told her.  “I want to tell her about Jean.”

After Derry had gone, Miss Emily stood looking at the cyclamen on the shelf.  It was a lovely thing, with a dozen blooms.  She wished that her benefactor had stayed to let her thank him.  She was not sure that she even knew where to send a note.

She hunted him up in the telephone book, and found him—­Ulrich Stoelle.  His hot-houses were on the old Military Road.  She remembered now to have seen them, and to have remarked the house, which was peaked up in several gables, and had quaint brightly-colored iron figures set about the garden—­with pointed caps like the graybeards in Rip van Winkle, or the dwarf in Rumpelstiltzkin.

When Derry’s car slid up to Margaret’s door, he saw the two children at an upper window.  They waved to him as he rang the bell.  He waited several moments and no one came to open the door.  He turned the knob and, finding it unlatched, let himself in.

As he went through the hall he was aware of a strange stillness.  Not a maid was in sight.  Passing Margaret’s room on the second floor he heard voices.

The children were alone in the nursery.  He was flooded with sunlight.  Margaret-Mary’s pink wash frock, Teddy’s white linen—­yellow jonquils in a blue bow—­snowy lambs gambolling on a green frieze—­Bo-peeps, flying ribbons—­it was a cheering and charming picture.