“Will you please not to ask me? I am a hasty fool in many things.”
“You mean you sometimes give pain without intending it?”
He bowed his head.
“Monsieur,” she said, very earnestly, “in that case will you throw away that flower from your button-hole?”
He seemed to have instinctively known what was coming. He put his hand over the withered posy.
“My theme,” he said—“that night—it cannot have hurt you. Madame herself proposed it.”
“Whence did you gather your theme?” she asked him.
“From the floor of the arbour,” he answered. “What then? It was of his Highness’s martyrdom I made it the text.”
She sought his eyes, a wistful pain lined between her own.
“Ah!” he said, before the appeal on her lips could be spoken; “do not insist. Let me buy my right to it with a song—a dream—a memory—something I cannot explain elsewise.”