While we were looking at the picture and Aggie was at the sink putting water in the glass that held the geraniums, Tufik having forgotten to do so, Tish’s neighbor from the apartment below, an elderly bachelor, came up the service staircase and knocked at the door.  Tish opened it.

“Humph!” said the gentleman from below.  “Gone is he?”

“Is who gone?”

“Your thieving Syrian, madam!”

Tish stiffened.

“Perhaps,” she said, “if you will explain—­”

“Perhaps,” snarled the visitor, “you will explain what you have done with my geraniums!  Why don’t you raise your own flowers?”

Tish was quite stunned and so was I. After all, it was Aggie who came to the rescue.  She slammed the lid on to the teakettle and set it on the stove with a bang.

“If you mean,” she said indignantly, “that you think we have any geraniums of yours—­”

“Think!  Didn’t my cook see your thieving servant steal ’em off the box on the fire-escape?”

“Then, perhaps,” Aggie suggested, “you will look through the apartment and see if they are here.  You will please look everywhere!”

Tish and I gasped.  It was not until the visitor had made the rounds of the apartment, and had taken an apologetic departure, that Tish and I understood.  The teakettle was boiling and from its spout coming a spicy and familiar odor.  Aggie took it off the stove and removed the lid.  The geraniums, boiled to a pulp, were inside.

“Back to Syria that boy goes!” said Tish, viewing the floral remains.  “He did it out of love and we must not chide him.  But we have our own immortal souls to think of.”

The next morning two things happened.  We gave Tufik one hundred and twenty dollars to buy a ticket back to Syria and to keep him in funds on the way.  And Tish got a note from Hannah:—­

  Dear Miss Tish:  I here you still have the dago—­or, as my sister’s
  husband says, he still has you.  I am redy to live up to my bargen if
  you are.

  Hannah.

  P.S.  I have lerned a new salud—­very rich, but delissious.

  H.

In spite of herself, Tish looked haunted.  It was the salad, no doubt.  She said nothing, but she looked round the untidy rooms, where everything that would hold it had a linen cover with a Cluny-lace edge—­all of them soiled and wrinkled.  She watched Tufik, chanting about the plains of Lebanon and shoving the carpet-sweeper with a bang against her best furniture; and, with Hannah’s salad in mind, she sniffed a warning odor from the kitchen that told of more Syrian experiments with her digestion.  Tish surrendered:  that morning she wrote to Hannah that Tufik was going back to Syria, and to come and brink the salad recipe with her.