"You may be quite sure I remember."
As she would have passed on he stopped her.
"One minute," he said. "The rose I told you of is out, to-day."
The tiny garden was fashioned into a square of grass-plot, a bed full of rose-trees in its midst. The Frau Karl Druschki, recently acquired, had only one half-unfolded bloom. He gathered it and gave to her as she stood beyond the iron rails.
"Only one! How could you pull it for me!" she reproached him.
"Absolutely pure white—quite flawless, you see," he said.
His touch lingered on the flower, for he loved roses; then he put it into her hand, and she went on her way.
In the bow-windowed front room of Horace Kilbourne's house his wife was lying on the sofa—semi-paralysed, a drunkard.
"That you, Horry dear?" she said, as, with a gloomy, hopeless face he looked in upon the unlovely sight.
She raised a frowsy head from its pillow, put a dirty hand to her eyes to shade them from the sun entering the darkened room by the open door, smiled fatuously upon her husband.