The elder answered. “Then I’ll join my daughter.” He gained the morning-room door, whence he repeated with an appropriate gesture—that of offering proudly, with light, firm fingers, a flower of his own celebrated raising—his happy formula of Miss Prodmore’s state. “The rose on its stem!” Scattering petals, diffusing fragrance, he thus passed out.
Chivers, meanwhile, had rather pointlessly settled once more in its place some small object that had not strayed; to whom Clement Yule, absently watching him, abruptly broke out. “I say, my friend, what colour is the rose?”
The old man looked up with a dimness that presently glimmered. “The rose, sir?” He turned to the open door and the shining day. “Rather a brilliant——”
“A brilliant——?” Yule was interested.
“Kind of old-fashioned red.” Chivers smiled with the pride of being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went out. “It’s the only one left—on the old west wall.”
His visitor’s mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. “My dear fellow, I’m not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she’s pretty?”
Chivers stood queerly rueful. “Laws, sir—it’s a matter I mostly notice; but isn’t it, at the same time, sir, a matter—like—of taste?”
“Pre-eminently. That’s just why I appeal with such confidence to yours.”
The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. “Well, sir,—mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like.”
“She isn’t merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?” Captain Yule’s attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an “Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn’t signify,” he went on. “What are you?” he more sociably demanded.