“Ugh! I should say not,” said Ellen. “Besides he’s a married man, and a flirt.”
“Well, I guess he doesn’t love his old wife,” said I.
“If she is old,” said Ellen, “so is he—maybe older. Disgusting.”
All next day I waited for that box of roses, and late in the afternoon, sure enough, it came, and with it a note:
“Dear Miss Marion:
Will you and your charming sister take a little drive with me and a friend this evening? If so, meet us at eight o’clock, corner of St. James and St. Denis streets. My friend has seen your sister in Judge Laflamme’s office” (Ellen worked there) “and he is very anxious to know her. As for me, I am thinking only of when I shall see my lovely rose again. I am counting the hours!
Devotedly,
Fred Stevens.”
The letter was written on the stationery of the fashionable St. James Club. Now I was positive that Colonel Stevens had fallen in love with me. I thought of his suffering because he could not marry me. In many of the French novels I had read men ran away from their wives, and, I thought: “Maybe the Colonel will want me to elope with him, and if I won’t, perhaps, he will kill himself,” and I began to feel very sorry to think of such a fine-looking soldierly man as Colonel Stevens killing himself just because of me.
When I showed Ellen the letter, after she got home from work, to my surprise and delight, she said:
“All right, let’s go. A little ride will refresh us, and I’ve had a hard week of it, but better not let mama know where we’re going. We’ll slip out after supper, when she’s getting the babies to sleep.”