One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a black mustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I would have passed around him, he greet me with offensive familiarity.
"Hello, Bellford!" he cried, loudly. "What the deuce are you doing in New York? Didn't know anything could drag you away from that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run alone, eh?"
"You have made a mistake, sir," I said, coldly, releasing my hand from
his grasp. "My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me."
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something about telegraph blanks.
"You will give me my bill," I said to the clerk, "and have my baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain where I am an- noyed by confidence men."
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned one on
lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served almost al fresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and lux- ury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take lunch- eon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.
"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone—a lady of about thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had been her very dear friend.
"You were about to pass me," she said, accusingly. "Don't tell me you do not know me. Why should we not shake hands—at least once in fif- teen years?"
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was phil- andering with an orange ice. I ordered a crème de menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities of a wood at twilight.
"Are you sure you know me?" I asked.
"No," she said, smiling. "I was never sure of that."
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"What would you think," I said, a little anxiously, "if I were to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas?" "What would I think?" she repeated, with a merry glance. "Why, that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian." Her voice lowered slightly—"You haven't changed much, Elwyn."
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely. "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 forgot- ten 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 curi- osity, 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 com- pletely 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 traveling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound—it was a laugh of
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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 ex- plain, 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-by, 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, giving the bulk of his attention to his fore- finger, "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 parlor. A lady and a gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been unusually good-look- ing had her features not been clouded by an expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure and possessed coloring and fea- tures that were agreeable to my fancy. She was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an earnest look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an un- steady hand to her bosom. I think she would have started forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of his hand. He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little gray about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.
"Bellford, old man," he said, cordially, "I'm glad to see you again. Of course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back with us, and be yourself again in no time."
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