“I shall be curious to hear him, if the Greek Club will ask me,” said Max.

“Oh, you’ll be in the East getting married,” answered Welsley.

Strangely enough, it was with something like a pang that Max said to himself that he wouldn’t be.

“Carnation, alabaster, gold and fire.”

It was not a bad line, he thought.

After dinner, he felt a little more amiable, and so he sat down and wrote his first real letter to his fiancee.

“If we were really engaged, my dear Christine,” he wrote, “you would have had a night letter long before this, asking you to explain to me just how it was that you did look on that amorous young poet.  His verse is pretty enough, though I can’t say I exactly enjoyed it.  However, my native town thinks very highly of him, and intends to ask him to come and address one of our local organizations.  If so, I shall have an opportunity of questioning him on the subject of the sources of his inspiration.  ’Is Helen a real person?’ I shall ask.  ‘Not so very,’ I can imagine his replying.  Ah, what would we both give to know?

“My friends here, stimulated by Dorothy Lane’s ravishing description of you, have asked many times to see your picture.  I am ashamed of my own carelessness in having gone away without obtaining one for exhibition purposes.  Will you send me one at once?  One not already in circulation among poets and painters.  I will set it on my writing table, and allow my eyes to stray sentimentally toward it whenever I have people to dinner.

“By the way, the day I left New York I told a florist to send you flowers every day.  We worked out quite an elaborate scheme for every day in the week.  Did he ever do it?

“Yours, at least in the sight of this company,

“MAX RIATT.”

In answer to this, he was surprised by a telegram: 

“So sorry for absurd mistake.  Entirely misunderstood source of the flowers.  Enjoy them a great deal more now.  Yes, they come regularly.  A thousand thanks.  Am sending photograph by mail.”

Riatt did not need to ask himself from whom she had imagined they came.  Not the poet, unless magazine rates were rising unduly.  Nor Hickson, who failed a little in such attentions.  No, it was Linburne—­and evidently Linburne’s attentions were taken so much as a matter of course, that she had not even thanked him, nor had he noticed her omission.

He did not answer the telegram, nor did he acknowledge the photograph but, true to his word, he established it at once on his desk in a frame which he spent a long time in selecting.  The picture represented Christine at her most queenly and unapproachable.  She wore the black and gold dress, and the huge feather fan was folded across her bare arms.  Every time he looked at it, he remembered how those same arms had been clasped round his own stiff and unbending neck.  And sometimes he found the thought distracted his attention from important matters.