The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel B0082RD4EM

directions from Mr. Denham. The few sights in the city had been exhausted; the places of interest in the environs could not be visited by ladies without escort; so it fell out that Lynde accompanied the Denhams on several short excursions—to Petit and Grand Sacconnex, to the Villa Tronchin, to Pregny and Mornex. These were days which Lynde marked with a red letter. At the end of the month, however, he was in the same state of distressing indecision relative to Miss Denham. On one point he required no light—he was deeply interested in her, so deeply, indeed, that it had become a question affecting all his future, whether or not she was the person he had encountered on his horseback journey three years before. If she was—
    But Edward Lynde had put the question out of his thought that night as he walked home from the cafe. His two bars of opera music lasted him to the hotel steps. Though it was late—a great bell somewhere, striking two, sent its rich reverberation across the lake while he was unlocking his chamber door—Lynde seated himself at a table and wrote his note to the Denhams.
    Flemming had promised to come and take coffee with him early the next morning, that is to say at nine o'clock. Before Flemming arrived, Lynde's invitation had been despatched and accepted. He was re-reading Miss Denham's few lines of acceptance when he heard his friend, at the other end of the hall, approaching with great strides.
    "The thousandth part of a minute late!" cried Flemming, throwing open the door. "There's no excuse for me. When a man lives in a city where they manufacture a hundred thousand watches a year—that's one watch and a quarter every five minutes day and night—it's a moral duty to be punctual. Ned, you look like a prize pink this morning." "I have had such a sleep! Besides, I've just gone through the excitement of laying out the menu for our dinner. Good heavens, I forgot the flowers! We'll go and get them after breakfast. There's your coffee. Cream, old man? I am in a tremor over this dinner, you know. It is a maiden effort. By the way, Flemming, I wish you'd forget what I said about Miss Denham, last evening. I was all wrong."
    "I told you so; what has happened?"
    "Nothing. Only I have reconsidered the matter, and I see I was wrong to let it upset me."
    "I saw that from the first."
    "Some persons," said Lynde gayly, "always see everything from the first. You belong to the I-told-you-so family, only you belong to the cheerful branch."
    "Thank the Lord for that! A wide-spreading, hopeful disposition is your only true umbrella in this vale of tears."
    "I shall have to borrow yours, then, if it rains heavily, for I've none of my own."
    "Take it, my boy; my name's on the handle!"
    On finishing their coffee the young men lighted cigars and sallied forth for a stroll along the bank of the river, which they followed to the confluence of the Rhone with the Arve, stopping on the way to leave an order at a florist's. Returning to the hotel some time after mid-day, they found the flowers awaiting them in Lynde's parlor, where a servant was already laying the cloth. There were bouquets for the ladies' plates, an imposing centre-piece in the shape of a pyramid, and a profusion of loose flowers.
    "What shall we do with these?" asked Lynde, pointing to the latter.
    "Set 'em around somewhere," said Flemming, with cheerful vagueness.
    Lynde disposed the flowers around the room to the best of his judgment; he hung some among the glass pendants of the chandelier, gave a nosegay to each of the two gilt statuettes in the corners, and piled the remainder about the base of a monumental clock on the mantelpiece.
    "That's rather a pretty idea, isn't it?—wreathing Time in flowers," remarked Flemming, with honest envy of his friend's profounder depth of poetic sentiment.
    "I thought it rather neat," said Lynde, who had not thought of it at all.
    In the course of that dinner if two or three unexplained demure smiles flitted over Miss Denham's face, they might, perhaps, have been indirectly traced to these floral decorations, though they pleased her more than if a woman's hand had been visible in them.
    "Flemming," said Lynde, with a severe aesthetic air, "I don't think that arrangement in the fireplace is quite up to the rest of the room."
    "Nor I either," said Flemming, who had been silently admiring it for the last ten minutes.
    The fireplace in question was stuffed with a quantity of long, delicately spiral shavings,