Imprudence by Ethel Mills

The Edward Morgans left the dance early, at whose suggestion Prudence never remembered. She was quite willing to go home. The misery of meeting again Philip Steele after the lapse of years, of discovering that she loved him -- that he loved her, had remained true to her memory always, was more than she could bear. The image of Steele filled her mind and so dominated her thoughts that she could not fix her attention on anything else.

She did not see him again. He left quietly soon after Edward Morgan led his wife away -- disappearing as he had come, unobtrusively, without meeting his hostess, feeling unequal to facing her, and fearful of risking a further encounter with the girl whose memory he had cherished faithfully since the night he had stood under her window and caught a rose which she dropped down to him for a token at parting. The rose was in his possession still, and it was no more faded with the years, he reflected with bitterness, than his memory was in her fickle affections.