“I’m sure I beg your pardon,” I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. “But
that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I’ve forgotten everything.”
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed
to see in my face.
“I’ve heard of you at times,” she went on. “You’re quite a big lawyer
out West—Denver, isn’t it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very proud of
you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did. You
may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone cost two thousand
dollars.”
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
“Would it be too late,” I asked, somewhat timorously, “to offer you
congratulations?”
“Not if you dare do it,” she answered, with such fine intrepidity that
I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb
nail.
“Tell me one thing,” she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly—“a
thing I have wanted to know for many years—just from a woman’s
curiosity, of course—have you ever dared since that night to touch,
smell or look at white roses—at white roses wet with rain and dew?”