inner
self which he had given her, these were things to hold close to her
heart. She had known on that first night that he was--different. She
had not dreamed that she should hold him--close.

Rather pensively she arranged her window. It was snowing hard, and in
spite of the fact that Christmas was only three days away, customers
were scarce.

The window display was made effective by the use of Jean's purple
camels--a sandy desert, a star overhead, blazing with all the realism
of a tiny electric bulb behind it, the Wise Men, the Inn where the Babe
lay, and in a far corner a group of shepherds watching a woolly flock--

Her cyclamen was dead. A window had been left open, and when she
arrived one morning she had found it frozen.

She had thanked Ulrich Stoelle for it, in a pleasantly worded note. She
had not dared express her full appreciation, lest she seem fulsome.
Few men in her experience had sent her flowers. Never in all the years
of her good friendship with Bruce McKenzie had he bestowed upon her a
single bloom.

Several days had passed, and there had been no answer to the note. She
had not really expected an answer, but she had thought he might come in.

He came in now, with a great parcel in his arms. He was a picturesque
figure in an enveloping cape and a soft hat pulled down over his gray
hair, and with white flakes powdered over his shoulders.

"Good morning, Miss Bridges," he said; "did you think I was never
coming?"

His manner of assuming that she had expected him quite took Emily's
breath away. "I am glad you came," she said, simply. "It is rather
dreary, with the snow, and this morning I found my cyclamen frozen on
the shelf."

He glanced up at it. "We have other flowers," he said, and, with a
sure sense of the dramatic effect, untied the string of his parcel.

Then there was revealed to Miss Emily's astonished eyes not the flowers
that she had expected, but four small plush elephants, duplicates in
everything but size of the one she had loaned to Ulrich, and each
elephant carried on his back a fragrant load of violets cunningly kept
fresh by a glass tube hidden in his trappings.

"There," said Ulrich Stoelle, "my father sent them. It is his taste,
not mine--but I knew that you would understand."

"But," Miss Emily gasped, "did he make them?"

"Most certainly. With his clever old fingers--and he will make as many
more as you wish."

Thus came white elephants back to Miss Emi