“I am glad if I am wrong.”

“It is nearly an unforgivable thing to be as wide of the mark as you are.  Oh, Margaret, if you had died that time!”

“You would have been very sorry?”

“Sorry?  No.  That doesn’t express it; one outlives mere sorrow.  If anything had happened to you, I should never have got over it.  You don’t know what those five weeks were to me.  It was a kind of death to come to this room day after day, and not find you.”

Margaret rested her eyes thoughtfully on the space occupied by Richard rather than on Richard himself, seeming to look through and beyond him, as if he were incorporeal.

“You missed me like that?” she said slowly.

“I missed you like that.”

Margaret meditated a moment.  “In the first days of my illness I wondered if you didn’t miss me a little; afterwards everything was confused in my mind.  When I tried to think, I seemed to be somebody else,—­I seemed to be you waiting for me here in the studio.  Wasn’t that singular?  But when I recovered, and returned to my old place, I began to suspect I had been bearing your anxiety,—­that I had been distressed by the absence to which you had grown accustomed.”

“I never got used to it, Margaret.  It became more and more unendurable.  This workshop was full of—­of your absence.  There wasn’t a sketch or a cast or an object in the room that didn’t remind me of you, and seem to mock at me for having let the most precious moments of my life slip away unheeded.  That bit of geranium in the glass yonder seemed to say with its dying breath, ’You have cared for neither of us as you ought to have cared; my scent and her goodness have been all one to you,—­things to take or to leave.  It was for no merit of yours that she was always planning something to make life smoother and brighter for you.  What had you done to deserve it?  How unselfish and generous and good she has been to you for years and years!  What would have become of you without her?  She left me here on purpose’—­it’s the geranium leaf that is speaking all the while, Margaret—­’to say this to you, and to tell you that she was not half appreciated; but now you have lost her.’”

As she leaned forward listening, with her lips slightly parted, Margaret gave an unconscious little approbative nod of the head.  Richard’s fanciful accusation of himself caused her a singular thrill of pleasure.  He had never before spoken to her in just this fashion; the subterfuge which his tenderness had employed, the little detour it had made in order to get at her, was a novel species of flattery.  She recognized the ring of a distinctly new note in his voice; but, strangely enough, the note lost its unfamiliarity in an instant.  Margaret recognized that fact also, and as she swiftly speculate don the phenomenon her pulse went one or two strokes faster.

“Oh, you poor boy!” she said, looking up with a laugh, and a flush so interfused that they seemed one, “that geranium took a great deal upon itself.  It went quite beyond its instructions, which were simply to remind you of me now and then.  One day, while you were out,—­the day before I was taken ill,—­I placed the flowers on the desk there, perhaps with a kind of premonition that I was going away from you for a time.”