Thirty years had passed.

Thirty years that I had spent in vainly trying to overcome the love and hatred which consumed me. However occupied I was with the pressing affairs of my almost over-filled life I was conscious of an undercurrent of despair—the despair that I had felt when Eve told me she no longer loved me.

We were engaged.

Whether she really loved me, or whether it was only a girlish fancy I could not tell. But the day was set for our wedding and was not far off when one Sunday afternoon I went to her house for tea.

The mahogany table in the library was covered with fallen rose petals—the roses he had sent her. Although no other detail of the room has remained in my memory, I still can see the rose petals covering the polished surface. By some inexplicable phenomenon those pink petals were fixed forever in my mind.

I left that part of the country and eventually lost all trace of Eve.

Thirty years later I had a professional engagement with a client.

The man was ill with a cold and asked me to come to his house—

I was shown into a large, stately drawing-room. Great portraits were on the walls, there was massive furniture, fine oriental rugs. A fire blazed on the hearth.

Then I perceived it—the great bowl of roses with fallen petals—scattered over the table

Like a knife they went through my soul——

Rose petals——

Eve—the ring she had returned, which lay in some dark recess of my desk——

The door opened and a tall slim girl advanced—

Eve I cried—my eyes blurred till I could hardly see.

With a strange, somewhat strained laugh, the girl replied that she had not been named for her mother, but it was often said that she was indeed her mother's living portrait.

Then she drew aside a heavy curtain—Before my dimmed eyes was a picture of Eve—

My Eve—

I fled from the house.

The purpose of my visit claimed not an instant of my thoughts. Nor did Eve.

Nor the past.

Rose petals only filled my mind.

I learned from a friend that Eve had been drowned years before in the St. Lawrence River—

She had left her husband and baby girl for another love.

Rose petals—

Rose petals everywhere.