“Ah, I thought that I had said it: a flower.”
“A—a rose?”
The hand that held her kimono pressed a little closer to her breast.
“Then you have found it?”
Mountain-peaks and glaciers in the sun: Cartaret, being a practical man, was distinctly aware of not wanting her to know the present whereabouts of that flower. He fenced for time.
“Was it a rose?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, “the Azure Rose.”
“What?” Perhaps, after all, he was wrong. “I’ve never heard of a blue rose.”
“It is not blue,” she said; “we call it the azure rose as you, sir, would say the rose of azure, or the rose of heaven. We call it the azure rose because it grows only in our own land, where the mountains are blue, and only high, high up on those mountains, near to the blue of the sky. It is a white rose.”
“Yes. Of course,” said Cartaret. “A white rose.”