Presently the one certain that her telepathy had not miscarried, and the other equally convinced that his reception of the message was accredited to him, the conversation was given an abrupt direction by an apparently alien question: "Do you know anything about flowers?" asked his companion. "Only the difference between a rose and a cauliflower," replied Dennis with a twinkle in his eye, to which the lady responded with a shade of disappointment. "An' why flowers?" asked Dennis. "Listen!" answered the lady with a slight return of her original sadness. "Eleven months ago I was left a widow. "My husband's estate consisted of a moderate amount of life insurance, a prosperous business, and no debts. "He was a florist. "The establishment is located in the heart of a very fashionable district. "There has scarcely been a function of the elite in this section which my husband has not supplied with floral decorations. "His taste was exquisite, and his taste was his undoing, for he added refinement to refinement until he began to lose sight of the practical side of existence. "By degrees he became as attenuated as some of the tendrils he cultivated with such absorption, and as frail as an orchid. "The intrusion of a pronounced scent was sufficient to induce a serious nervous disturbance, and he could no more endure disproportionate and sharp distinctions of color than a lapidary could tolerate a serious unevenness of facets. "I was compelled to paper his room with a delicate shade of lavender. "The furniture was stained a light buff, and the upholstering was a delicate cretonne livened by exquisite tracings of wisteria. "The carpet was light blue, surrounded by a border of deeper blue, lightly emphasized by suggestions of trailing arbutus. "Despite all this," continued the lady sadly as she paused to enjoy an intentness of interest on the part of the bewildered Dennis, so profound that the dickey backs had been permitted to fall unregarded to the ground, and their printed extravagances, by contrast with this unusual recital, relegated to the most prosaic of occurrences, "despite all these precautions, the most carefully guarded recesses are not entirely secure. "For one day an elaborately protected package arrived during my absence, and my husband opened it. "At once a pungent, overpowering sweetness filled the air, and the very surfeit of its fragrance threw my husband into a convulsion of delight which ended in a stupor so replete that we were able only to restore the poor man to consciousness by hypodermics of--what was to him a most violent stimulant--Cambric Tea." Dennis looked his astonishment at these accumulating refinements, and in the pause that followed the narration of this last episode he inquired, with the appreciative hesitation of one who is reluctant to advance lest he destroy the dew-gemmed tracery of a fragile spider's web. "An' what kind of flowers did all this?"