Rose MacLeod

								

Her brilliant face softened into something wistful.
"The bush will come into bloom in a few weeks, Billy," she reminded him.
"I shan't ever bloom again."
"Boo to a goose!" said Billy. "You're in bloom now."
The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed
him sharply.
"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of
mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if
the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew,
Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty
years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."
Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his
hand on his heart, made her a bow.
"I don't care for it much myself," he said.
"Growing old? It's the devil, Billy. Don't talk about it. Why aren't you
in England?"
"I'm junior partner now."
"I know it."
"I'm a great publisher, Florrie."
She nodded.
"Your men run over to arrange with us in London. There was no occasion
for my coming here. But I simply wanted to. I got a little
curious--homesick, maybe. So I came. Got in last night. I read your book
before I sailed."
She looked at him quizzically and almost, it might be said, with a droll
uneasiness.
"You brought it out in England," she offered, in rather a small voice.
"Naturally you'd read it."
"Not because we brought it out. Because it was yours," he corrected her.
"My word, Florrie, what a life you've had of it."
The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.
"Are you trying to pump me, Billy Stark?" she inquired.
"Not for a moment. But you're guilty, Florrie. What is it?"
She considered, her gaze bent on her lap.
"Well, the fact is, Billy," she temporized, "I've got in pretty deep
with that book. I wrote it as a sort of a--well, I wrote it, you know,
and I thought I might get a few hundred dollars out of it, same as I
have out of those novels I used to write to keep lace on my petticoats.
Well! the public has made a fool of itself over the book. Every day I
get piles of letters asking what I meant by this and that, and won't I
give my documentary evidence for saying this or that great gun did so
and so at such a time."
"Well, why don't you?"
"Give my evidence? Why, I can't!" She was half whimpering, with a laugh
on her old face. "I haven't got it."
"You mean you haven't the actual letters now. Those extraordinary ones
of the abolitionist group, for example,--can't you produce them?"
"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"--she held his glance with a
mixture of deprecation and a gay delight--"I made them up."
William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing
rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on
the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth
Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same