But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement over something else, and my own different excitement hadn't a chance against this greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say, even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they have anything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied I couldn't have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept it to myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me about the Daughters of Dixie.

I bowed absently to the poetess. "And your poem?" I said. "A great success, I am sure?"

"Why, didn't you hear me say so?" said the upcountry bride; and then, after a smile at the others, "I'm sure your flowers were graciously accepted."

"Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael," I replied.

"Oh, oh, oh!" went the bride. "How would she know?"

I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a step which we had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss La Heu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the counter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering them to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did much better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.

They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, "graciously accepted." Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her ledger. She was looking lovely.

"I expected you yesterday," she said. "The new Lady Baltimore was ready."

"Well, if it is not all eaten yet—"

"Oh, no! Not a slice gone."

"Ah, nobody does your art justice here!"

"Go and sit down at your table, please."

It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it, and I did my best.

"I shall miss my lunches here very much when I'm gone."

"Did you say coffee to-day?"

"Chocolate. I shall miss—"

"And the lettuce sandwiches?"

"Yes. You don't realize how much these lunches—"

"Have cost you?" She seemed determined to keep laughing.

"You have said it. They have cost me my—"

"I can give you the receipt, you know."

"The receipt?"

"For Lady Baltimore, to take with you."