"
"Geranium, Nutmeg--I expect a meeting."
So! Romance never does things by halves. If she comes back to you she
brings gifts and her knitting, and will sit in your chimney-corner if
you will let her.
And now Ravenel smiled. The lover smiles when he thinks he has won.
The woman who loves ceases to smile with victory. He ends a battle;
she begins hers. What a pretty idea to set the four roses in her
window for him to see! She must have a sweet, poetic soul. And now to
contrive the meeting.
A whistling and slamming of doors preluded the coming of Sammy Brown.
Ravenel smiled again. Even Sammy Brown was shone upon by the
far-flung rays of the renaissance. Sammy, with his ultra clothes, his
horseshoe pin, his plump face, his trite slang, his uncomprehending
admiration of Ravenel--the broker's clerk made an excellent foil to
the new, bright unseen visitor to the poet's sombre apartment.
Sammy went to his old seat by the window, and looked out over the
dusty green foliage in the garden. Then he looked at his watch, and
rose hastily.
"By grabs!" he exclaimed. "Twenty after four! I can't stay, old man;
I've got a date at 4:30."
"Why did you come, then?" asked Ravenel, with sarcastic jocularity,
"if you had an engagement at that time. I thought you business men
kept better account of your minutes and seconds than that."
Sammy hesitated in the doorway and turned pinker.
"Fact is, Ravvy," he explained, as to a customer whose margin is
exhausted, "I didn't know I had it till I came.
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