"John," she said, "I am so glad to see you; but I--I want to tell you. Everything here is so new, I--I don't--"
It must all be true; I remember her exact words. They came slowly, hesitated, stopped.
"Are you--what do you mean, Helen?"
"Let me tell you; let me think. Don't--please don't be angry."
Through the fog that enveloped me I felt her distress and smarted from the wrong I did so beautiful a creature.
"I--I didn't expect you so soon," the music sighed pleadingly. "I--we mustn't hurry about--what we used to talk of. New York is so different!-- Oh, but it isn't that! How shall I make you understand?"
"I understand enough," I said dully; "or rather--Great Heavens!--I understand nothing; nothing but that--you are taking back your promise, aren't you? Or Helen's promise; whose was it?"
I could not feel as if I were speaking to my sweetheart. The figure before me wore her pearl-set Kappa key--the badge of her college fraternity; it wore, too, a trim, dark blue dress--Helen's favourite colour and mine--but there resemblance seemed to stop.
Confused as I still was by the glory I gazed on, I began painfully comparing the Nelly I remembered and the Helen I had found. My Helen was not quite so tall, but at twenty girls grow. She did not sway with the yielding grace of a young white birch; but she was slim and straight, and girlish angles round easily to curves. Though I felt a subtle and wondrous change, I could not trace or track the miracle.
My Helen had blue-gray eyes; this Helen's eyes might, in some lights, be blue-gray; they seemed of as many tints as the sea. They were dark, luminous and velvet soft as they watched my struggle. A few minutes earlier they had been of extraordinary brilliancy.
My Helen had soft brown hair, like and how unlike these fragrant locks that lay in glinting waves with life and sparkle in every thread!
My Helen's face was expressive, piquantly irregular. The face into which I looked lured me at moments with a haunting resemblance; but the brow was lower and wider, the nose straighter, the mouth more subtly modelled. It was a face Greek in its perfection, brightened by western force and softened by some flitting touch of sensuousness and mysticism.
My Helen blushed easily, but otherwise had little colour. This Helen had a baby's delicate skin, with rose-flushed cheeks and red, red lips. When she spoke or smiled, she seemed to glow with an inner radiance that had nothing to do with colour. And, oh, how beautiful! How beautiful!