“Yes, Mrs. Andrews, if you will go with me.”

Edna bent over her flowers, and recognizing many favorites that recalled the hothouse at Le Bocage, her eyes filled with tears, and she hastily put her lips to the snowy cups of an oxalis.  How often she had seen just such fragile petals nestling in the buttonhole of Mr. Murray’s coat.

“I shall write and invite him to come early and take tea with us.  Now, Miss Earl, pardon my candor, I should like to know what you intend to wear?  You know that Mr. Manning is quite lionized here, and you will have to face a terrific battery of eyes and lorgnettes; for everybody will stretch his or her neck to find out, first, who you are, and secondly, how you are dressed.  Now I think I understand rather better than you do what is comme il faut in these matters and I hope you will allow me to dictate on this occasion.  Moreover, our distinguished escort is extremely fastidious concerning ladies’ toilettes.”

“Here are my keys, Mrs. Andrews; examine my wardrobe and select what you consider appropriate for to-night.”

“On condition that you permit me to supply any deficiencies which I may discover?  Come to my room at six o’clock, and let Victorine dress your hair.  Let me see, I expect a la Grec will best suit your head and face.”

Edna turned to her pupils and their books, but all day the flowers in the vase on the table prattled of days gone by; of purple sunsets streaming through golden starred acacia boughs; of long, languid, luxurious Southern afternoons dying slowly on beds of heliotrope and jasmine, spicy geraniums and gorgeous pelargoniums; of dewy, delicious summer mornings, for ever and ever past, when standing beside a quivering snowbank of Lamarque roses, she had watched Tamerlane and his gloomy rider go down the shadowy avenue of elms.

The monotonous hum of the children’s voices seemed thin and strange and far, far off, jarring the sweet bouquet babble; and still as the hours passed, and the winter day waned, the flower Fugue swelled on and on, through the cold and dreary chambers of her heart; now rising stormy and passionate, like a battle-blast, from the deep orange trumpet of a bignonia; and now whispering and sobbing and pleading, from the pearly white lips of hallowed oxalis.

When she sat that night in Mr. Manning’s box at the Academy of Music, the editor raised his opera-glass, swept the crowded house, scanning the lovely, beaming faces wreathed with smiles, and then his grave, piercing glance came back and dwelt on the countenance at his side.  The cherry silk lining and puffing on her opera-cloak threw a delicate stain of color over her exquisitely moulded cheeks, and in the braid of black hair which rested like a coronal on her polished brow, burned a scarlet anemone.  Her long lashes drooped as she looked down at the bouquet between her fingers, and listening to the Fugue which memory played on the petals, she sighed involuntarily.