When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given.
"I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had gone out of her.
The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood.
"We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't ask what I mean. You must answer."
She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it.
"Yes," she owned gleefully. "Yes, I am."
"That's a good lady. You're very beautiful, too, aren't you?"
"Yes," she corroborated. "Oh, I'd swear to anything!"
"If it's true," he corrected her. "What are your accomplishments, missy? Do you play the piano?"
For his life, Osmond could not have told why he addressed her as he did, or how he got the words. Some strange self seemed to have sprung up in him, a self that had a language he had not learned from books nor used to woman. The new self grew rapidly. He felt it wax within him. It was loquacious, too. It seemed to have more to say than there would be time for in a million years; but he gave it head.