He was there in the gloom; he strove not to be seen, but a stray ray from a lamp at the vintner’s gleamed on his handsome dark face, lean and pallid and yearning and sad, but full of force and of soul like a head of Rembrandt’s. Lili stretched her hands to him with a noble, candid gesture and a sweet, tremulous laugh: “What you have given me!—it is you?—it is you?”
“Mademoiselle forgives?” he murmured, leaning as far out as the gable would permit. The street was still deserted, and very quiet. The theatres were all open to the people that night free, and bursts of music from many quarters rolled in through the sultry darkness.
Lili colored over all her fair, pale face, even as I have seen my sisters’ white breasts glow to a wondrous, wavering warmth as the sun of the west kissed them. She drew her breath with a quick sigh. She did not answer him in words, but with a sudden movement of exquisite eloquence she broke from me my fairest and my last-born blossom and threw it from her lattice into his.
Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice with a swift, trembling hand, and left the chamber dark, and fled to the little sleeping-closet where her crucifix and her mother’s rosary hung together above her bed.
As for me, I was left bereaved and bleeding. The dew which waters the growth of your human love is usually the tears or blood of some martyred life.
I loved Lili.
I prayed, as my torn stem quivered and my fairest begotten sank to her death in the night and the silence, that I might be the first and the last to suffer from the human love born that night.
I, a rose—Love’s flower.
