f these entertainments--her Girls' Sewing Society was
giving a party--that she and the Young Doctor had their first real talk.
Before the quarrel at the luncheon table they had had little time
together; since the quarrel the Young Doctor had seldom been able to
corner Rose-Marie. But at the entertainment they were placed, by the hand
of circumstance, upon a wooden settee in the back of the room. And there,
for the better part of two hours--while Katie Syrop declaimed poetry and
Helen Merskovsky played upon the piano, and others recited long and
monotonous dialogues--they were forced to stay.

The Young Doctor was in a chastened mood. He applauded heartily whenever
a part of the program came to a close; the comments that he made behind
his hand were neither sarcastic nor condescending. He praised the work
that Rose-Marie had done and then, while she was glowing--almost against
her will--from the warmth of that praise, he ventured a remark that had
nothing to do with the work.

"When I see you," he told her very seriously, "when I see you, sitting
here in one of our gray coloured meeting rooms, I can't help thinking how
appropriate your name is. Rose-Marie--there's a flower, isn't there,
that's named Rosemary? I like flowery names!"

Rose-Marie laughed, as lightly as she could, to cover a strange feeling
of embarrassment.

"Most people don't like them," she said--"flowery names, I mean. I don't
myself. I like names like Jane, and Anne, and Nancy. I like names like
Phyllis and Sarah. I've always felt that my first name didn't fit my last
one. Thompson," she was warming to her subject, "is such a matter-of-fact
name. There's no romance in it. But Rose-Marie--"

The Young Doctor interrupted.

"But Rose-Marie," he finished for her, "is teeming with romance! It
suggests vague perfumes, and twilight in the country, and gay little
lights shining through the dusk. It suggests poetry."

Rose-Marie had folded her hands, softly, in her lap. Her eyes were bent
upon them.

"My mother," she said, and her voice was quiet and tender, "loved poetry.
I've heard how she used to read it every afternoon, in her garden. She
loved perfumes, too, and twilight in the country. My mother was the sort
of a woman who would have found the city a bit hard, I think, to live in.
Beauty meant such a lot--to her. She gave me my name because she thought,
just as you think, that it had a hint of lovely things in it. And, even
though I sometimes feel