"Your pardon. While I was composing my Arivana on the veranda of a small house in India, this flower bloomed and glowed from its dark green foliage everywhere, and now it greets me here in the cold North. May I keep this flower?"
Adelaide made a half reluctant gesture.
"No, why should you?"
"Why should I? For a remembrance of the severe opinion from the lips of a lady who bears the lovely name of my mystic heroine. You see, gracious lady, that the white japonica blooms here also, delicate, snowy flower; but unconsciously you broke the glowing red one, and poets are superstitious. Leave me the flower as a token that my work, in spite of all, may find favor in your eyes after you learn to know it. You have no idea how much it means to me."
"Herr Rojanow--I----" She was about to utter a refusal, but he interrupted her, and continued in low, but passionate, tones:
"What is a single flower to you, broken carelessly, and which you will allow to fade as carelessly? But to me leave me this token, gracious lady; I--I beg for it."
He stood close beside her. The charm which he, as a boy, had unconsciously exerted when he made people "defenseless" with his coaxing, he, as a man, recognized as a power which never failed, and which he knew how to use. His voice bore again that soft, suppressed tone which charmed the ear like music; and his eyes--those dark, mysterious eyes--were fixed upon the girl before him with a half gloomy, half beseeching expression.
The paleness of her face had deepened, but she did not answer.
"I beg of you," he repeated, more lowly, more beseechingly, as he pressed the glowing flower to his lips; but the very gesture broke the spell. Adelaide suddenly drew herself up.
"I must ask you, Herr Rojanow, to return the flower to me. I intended it for my husband."