1891? May, 1891? It could not be just a coincidence that this old letter was in the file of 1891. That must have been the year when Jemmie received it. And the month was May. That was the time when Jemmie was so frequently having to be away for the night on business. But why should he have filed only this note? It surely had no more sentimental value than many others he must have received from this Maudie. It must have been put away with his papers by accident. Perhaps this was the very note that kept him from coming home to dinner that night when Pierre came and when Richard fell ill. "If I had known of the existence of this Maudie, would anything have kept me from going away that night?" Mary asked herself. The sere chrysanthemums were lost in the wan radiance of the November sunlight: the sodden lawn and greasy London trees vanished: the outlines of other houses no longer affronted the vision. Mighty palms cooled the fervid air with their green and glittering fans: their trunks were wreathed with odorous trumpet-flowers to steal whose honey came fluttering a myriad humming-birds with breasts of emerald and lapis-lazuli, and rubied wings, and tails of fire. "My boys have cut a path before us through the forest. Let us ride through, my love, to the sea." Perfume on perfume, color on color, with the forest stretching behind them and before them. "You are tired, my love. Dismount. Here is a filanjàna in which you may travel through the forest to the sea." A filanjàna, a filanjàna. Thus had Pierre named the palanquin in which he promised that she should travel with him in Madagascar. A filanjàna! A filanjàna! Swaying lightly in a filanjàna, she traveled on through the forest to the sea. Sun-birds and parroquets and purple kingfishers flew down the forest glade on either side of the gently swaying filanjàna; and so at last they came to the sea ... the sea ... to the nipped and withered chrysanthemums and the slimy city trees. "If I had known that Richard would be killed ten years later, and that Geoffrey would run off with a barmaid, would I have gone away that night?" "No." "Why not?" "Because I should have known that one day I should be fifty." "Am I really fifty?" "Yes. I am fifty, fifty, fifty. How strange that I should have remembered that word filanjàna. It had been hidden away all these years in a secret room of memory like a bit of jewelry that one buys on a voyage." "Yes, but if I'm fifty, Maudie can't be much less. What happened then to her and what happened then to me matters nothing, to either of us." "Poor Maudie!" She could not have had any illusions about Jemmie, or she would never have called him Podge. It was not a name that could share a grand passion. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Still, Podge and Juliet. No, whatever Juliet might think about roses and Montagues, she would never have called Romeo Podge. "But I need not reproach myself with not having told him about Pierre."