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same address.' I didn't show by the wink of an eyelash that I had 'caught on,' but I tucked a big pansy in the box with her roses, just to let her know we were thinking of her.
"Two days afterward there came an order from him, by telephone, for dozens and dozens of white roses and white violets, and dozens of tiny white buds. We knew what had happened without reading the deaths in the papers. Maude—she is the girl over there with the droopy blonde hair and the big brown eyes—she sits up half the night reading novels—just sat down on the floor behind the counter and cried, and even I, who pose as strong-minded, couldn't help feeling that fate had made a mistake in taking that bright, pretty girl and her little baby away from a world where they had everything the human heart could wish for. That was a year and a half ago."
She sighed, and gazed retrospectively at the opposite wall.
"Oh, how sad, but yet how sweet!" I exclaimed. "And he still wears that band of crêpe on his sleeve for her, and he was getting those orchids, I suppose, for her grave?"
"Oh, no," said the girl, with the half-sad smile of the philosopher; "that crêpe is for his mother-in-law—his second one—and those orchids are for his wife."
IN RUBRIC
I OPED an antique missal clasped with gold,
The puckered parchment cover fretted o'er
With curious figures some skilled hand of yore
Limned thereupon,—designs minutely scrolled;
And on an oft-thumbed page did I behold
One word in rubric—LOVE. This, and no more,
I marked among black-letter lines a score,
So deeply did it on my heart take hold.
To one I showed it whose bright aureole
Of hair had filched the first soft lights of dawn,
And over it she brooded lingeringly;
Could she but ope the missal of my soul,
And turn each page, in rubric thereupon
That word, and that word only, would she see!
A COME DOWN
Quericus—Vhat do you think of the new woman, who wants the earth?
Cynicus—It's been found that if she gets an offer of marriage she is satisfied with a Queen Anne cottage out in Lonelyhurst.