Page:Tales of John Oliver Hobbes.djvu/102

86 Grace had no eye for the flowers; she saw only the amused grin on the face of a passing butcher-boy.

"My dear Godfrey," she said, "thanks awfully. But why didn't you have them sent up from the shop? It looks so odd to carry them through the streets—such a large bunch, too."

She gave them to the housemaid when she got into the house, and told her to "arrange" them for the dinner-table. Godfrey went into his study, and remembered miserably how he had once given Cynthia a field-poppy, and she had kissed it. Although he persuaded himself that she had probably thrown it into a ditch when his back was turned, he sighed. Why was transcendent virtue so much less charming in its methods than mere worldliness? It was small consolation to think that most men had wondered the same thing since the Fall of Adam; nor did it occur to him that the fault did not rest with virtue, but with what man is too apt to mistake for it.