André had slipped the first roll he came across into the phonograph; and when he came back to Ellen’s side, to place on her youthful ivory flesh the vermilion rose that seemed like a scrap torn from his Redskin’s mouth-colored epidermis, the instrument struck up an old ballad.

Although André Marcueil was not unaware that the song was very well-known, and appeared in several anthologies of folk songs, he shuddered disagreeably at the curious coincidence of his gesture with the first few verses:

I picked a crimson ro-se

To offer to my love,

O sweetest nightingale!

Ellen uttered a cry, hid her head beneath Marcueil’s arm, then raised it again and looked into her lover’s eyes with a glance that clearly signified, in spite of her mask:

“What an extraordinary thing, but as it was you who did it it doesn’t surprise me any more.”

André was now master of himself once more and dissimulating his concern; she broke into joyous laughter, but a second rapid glance at Marcueil’s expression revealed a cloud that she thought she could account for.

“You’re not going to be jealous, are you, at that glass mouth presuming to offer me flowers? He was quite in order, my dear, they did belong to him. He’s giving you a lesson in gallantry.” And, as she knew some rather improper words, she specified: “The paying-poker, isn’t that right, isn’t that the expression?” The instrument, meanwhile, had repeated:

I picked a crimson ro-se

To offer to my love.

Then it gave a sort of macabre trill, an interminable krr. . . as though chiding the young woman for her familiarity, or else clearing its throat; but this was merely a pause before the second couplet:

The rose brings grievous news, love,

Grievous beyond all telling.

O sweetest nightingale!

The rose brings grievous news, love,

Grievous beyond all telling.

The crystal funnel vibrated, drawing out the last two syllables like a dying call:

“El-len!”

Set amidst the rest of the flowers, it looked like an oversized monocle for a nasty-tempered cyclops, which was staring at them, or like a highwayman’s blunderbuss on the main road of their love, or, even worse, like a flower in the buttonhole of a very dapper old gentleman, blooming with a whole store of bleeding things which, too, were going to constitute “grievous news.”

At the first figure of the dance

The fair maid’s color changed,

O sweetest nightingale!

“At the first?” said Ellen, whose color did indeed change, as she blushed. “This vase was a little late in getting the rose stalks out of its eye, if it’s only just noticed us. . .”

“A single figure, it has to be the first one,” said the “Indian.”

Ellen did not answer, for they were making love.