One day I said, "To-morrow I must have holiday. There are certain things that need burying, Bettie dear, and--it is just the funeral of my youth I want to go to."
"So it is to-morrow that we go for an admiring walk around our emotions!" Bettie said. She knew well enough of what event to-morrow was the anniversary, and it is to her credit she added: "Well, for this once--!" For of all the women whom I had loved, there was but one that Bettie Hamlyn had ever bothered about. And to-morrow was Stella's birthday, as I had very unconcernedly mentioned a few moments earlier, when I was looking for the Austin Dobson book, and had my back turned to Bettie.
Next day, in Cedarwood, a woman in mourning--in mourning fluffed and jetted and furbelowed in such pleasing fashion that it seemed flamboyantly to demand immediate consolation of all marriageable males,--viewed me with a roving eye as I heaped daffodils on Stella's grave. They had cost me a pretty penny, too, for this was in September. But then I must have daffodils, much as I loathe the wet, limp feel o. them, because she would have chosen daffodils.... Well! I fancied this woman thought me sanctioned by both church and law in what I did,--and viewed me in my supposedly recent bereavement and gauged my potentialities,--viewed me, in short, with the glance of adventurous widowhood.
My faith (I meditated) if she knew!--if I could but speak my thought to her!
"Madam,"--let us imagine me, my hat raised, my voice grave,--"the woman who lies here was a stranger to me. I did not know her. I knew that her eyes were blue, that her hair was sunlight, that her voice had pleasing modulations; but I did not know the woman. And she cared nothing for me. That is why my voice shakes as I tell you of it. And I have brought her daffodils, because of all flowers she loved them chiefly, and because there is no one else who remembers this. It is the flower of spring, and Stella--for that was her name, madam,--died in the spring of the year, in the spring of her life; and Stella would have been just twenty-six to-day. Oh, and daffodils, madam, are all white and gold, even as that handful of dust beneath us was all white and gold when we buried it with a flourish of crepe and lamentation, some two years and five months ago. Yet the dust there was tender flesh at one time, and it clad a brave heart; but we thought of it--and I among the rest,--as a plaything with which some lucky man might while away his leisure hours. I believe now that it was something more. I believe--ah, well, my _credo_ is of little consequence. But whatever this woman may have been, I did not know her. And she cared nothing for me."