"Do you think,"
she asked, glancing toward the stage,
"he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise.
He had called only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses, and each time without a card.
She had never before made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender.
Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too—I was going to leave the theatre in order to take the picture away with me," he said.
To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily. She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands, and said, after a pause:
"What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.