Every Saturday night, all through that lazy spring, I used to take a rose to Miss Caroline Wellford. Every Saturday night, rain or shine, at exactly eight o'clock.
Miss Caroline was abandoned by her future husband Jeffrey Pinniman, who married Christine Marlowe, a younger and prettier girl. It almost became a scandal in our town. Miss Caroline could hear unkind things about her everywhere she went. For six months she had shut herself up in her house and seemed determined to turn herself into an odd old maid. She looked like a ghost that night when I delivered the first rose. "Hello, Jimmy," she said listlessly. When I handed her the box, she looked shocked — "For me?"
Again the next Saturday, at exactly the same time, I found myself delivering another rose to Miss Caroline. The third time she opened the door so quickly that I knew she must have been waiting. There was a little color in her cheeks and her hair no longer looked so straggly.
The morning after my fourth trip to her house, Miss Caroline played the organ again in church. She held her head high with the rose pinned to her blouse.
When I made my final trip to Miss Caroline's house, I said, as I handed her the box, "This is the last time I'll bring this, Miss Caroline. " She hesitated and invited me to come in and handed me a model of a sailing ship, exquisitely（精巧地）carved.
Fleeing back to the shop, I looked in the file where Mr. Olsen kept his untidy records, and I found what I was looking for. "Pinniman," it said, in Mr. Olsen's crabbed script.
The years went by, and one day I came again to Olsen's flower shop. My old boss and I talked a while. Out of curiosity, I asked, "D'you suppose that Mrs. Pinniman ever knew her husband was sending flowers to his old flame?" "Jeffrey Pinniman never even knew about it. " Mr. Olsen smiled, "It is a lady who said she wasn't going to sit around watching Miss Caroline make a martyr (长期受痛苦的人) of herself at her expense. "
