was old enough to be his mother. She had thrown her arms around his neck and kissed him and they had performed a crude dance of exuberant joy in the small bedroom. Margaret had arranged her yellow roses in the bowl. She had drawn forward the Bee Master’s chair and set before it the slippers that Jamie had been wearing. It was her way of inviting him to take his place as the master of the house. She had set a table with the daily paper on it beside the chair, and every other vase and pitcher in the house that ever had held flowers was flower-decked.
Jamie smiled with pleasure as he glanced around the living room. He thought how few men there were in the world who could take insensate objects and make a room so livable as the Bee Master had made the room upon which he had indelibly stamped his tastes, his mentality, his artistic tendencies. Then Jamie swung open the door and stood as still, as still as the last pause before the breaking of a great storm. The sleeping room was dusted; there was fresh linen; it was shining; it was reeking with the odour of sage, an odour that never in any faintest degree had attached to Margaret Cameron, and on the night stand beside the bed where the light stood and the thermos bottle for water, was the copper bowl, and the copper bowl was overflowing with sand verbena. The exquisite flowers, with the refreshment of water, with the evening hour, as was their habit, were rolling up and spilling abroad their faint, delicate incense, the most beautiful flower perfume, Jamie thought, in all a world of flowers. He walked
