He remembered that morning in the woods—her face when she had looked up at him from the violets she was picking—that radiant face, clear-eyed as a child’s.
“It’s my fault!” he cried aloud. “I ought to have known she couldn’t take care of herself properly. It’s my fault! The poor little thing! She’s done some fool trick—got her feet wet—probably makes her lunch of an ice cream soda—perhaps she can’t afford any lunch. And now—pneumonia! She had no right to get pneumonia! It’s—”
He stopped short, in a still, dark little lane, clenched his hands, stood there shaken by pain, by anger, by all the unreason of grief and anxiety.
“She ought to have known better!” he shouted.
VII
When he came downstairs the next morning, Mrs. Brown regarded his strained and haggard face with profound interest, and she observed to one of the old ladies that she believed Mr. Anderson was “coming down with something.”
He made inquiries about Miss Selby’s health, and obtained very vague and confused replies, which he interpreted as people jaded and despondent from a bad night are apt to interpret things. He went into the dining room, but he could eat no breakfast. Who could, sitting alone at a little table, opposite an empty chair? Then he went out again.
It was a rainy day, but that was so fitting that he scarcely noticed it. He remembered having seen a greenhouse not far away, and he went there. It was not open on Sunday, but he made it be open. He banged so loud and so long on the door that at last an old man came out of a near-by cottage.
“It’s a case of pneumonia!” said the young man, fiercely. “I’ve got to have some flowers.”
So he was admitted to the greenhouse, and he bought everything there was, and then sat down at a little desk to write a card. He never forgot the writing of that card, the rain drumming down on the glass roof, the palms and rubber trees standing about him, and the hot, moist, steamy smell like a jungle. He never forgot what he wrote, or how he felt while he wrote it.