“Yes, you have,” she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in her latest tones; “I see it now. You haven’t forgotten. You haven’t forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never could.”

I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe. “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?”

I took a sip of crème de menthe.

“It would be useless, I suppose,” I said, with a sigh, “for me to repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.”

The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my words and went travelling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound—it was a laugh of happiness—yes, and of content—and of misery. I tried to look away from her.

“You lie, Elwyn Bellford,” she breathed blissfully. “Oh, I know you lie!”

I gazed dully into the ferns.

“My name is Edward Pinkhammer,” I said. “I came with the delegates to the Druggists’ National Convention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take little interest.”

A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I took her hand, and bowed.

“I am deeply sorry,” I said to her, “that I cannot remember. I could explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the—the roses and other things.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Bellford,” she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.

I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his finger-nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side.

“Mr. Pinkhammer,” he said casually, giving the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, “may I request you to step aside with me for a little conversation? There is a room here.”

“Certainly,” I answered.

He conducted me into a small, private parlour. A lady and a gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an expression of keen