Mr Burton gathered up the strewn, rejected gift.
“She has got my white Flower of Innocence here, I see,” he remarked, and smiled with pleasure at sight of the bloom.
Lawless was lying with his face turned away, staring out of the window.
“You can leave that with me,” he said quietly,—“as being appropriate.”
Mr Burton carried the disordered bunch of flowers back to the giver with a beaming countenance.
“He flung them at me,” he explained delightedly.
Mrs Lawless looked hurt. The little man’s pleasure in the scorn of her gift appeared to her unkind.
“He kept back one bloom—a white one. But so long as you choose an emissary to convey your gift, he is not interested in it, he says.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment, her face flushing and paling in turns. Then she went close to him, took the despised flowers from him and rearranged them carefully. She put a flower in his coat, and drawing back surveyed the effect and him with a tender, affectionate smile.
“That is because this morning I shall not accompany you,” she said.