She, as like a Dresden china shape in melting demureness, as sunnily contrived in pink and blue and gold, was only the other’s better partner by reason of eyes slightly bluer than his, of hair a shade more golden, of lips of a rosier dye on the soft pallour of her face. By the same token she stood as much nearer to womanhood as he stood from manhood—a step either way. It swelled in her, though she was but fifteen, as the milk-kernels swell in nuts. I think she was at the perfect poise, largeness in promise waiting on performance, shapely as Psyche when first stolen by love—a covetable bud, whom no mortal man could be above the desire to open with a kiss.
As this man, this good man, in a fury of love sanctified, desired suddenly and uncontrollably. She stood before him, her face a little raised, her lips a little parted—the prettiest figure between tears and rapture. Her hat hung on her shoulders by a blue ribbon looped about her neck, leaving her hair loose-coiled to snare the sun. Her dress was a fine smock, having half-sleeves tied at the elbows with ribbons, and a low bodice of rich blue velvet, open and laced in front, to clasp it about the middle. From her hips fell, in a fluting of Greek folds, a white skirt just long enough to show her ankles and silver shoe-buckles, and there were blue velvet ribbons fastened with diamond studs on her wrists.
So she stood gazing up at him, tremulous and fearful, unknowing but half guessing what she had brought upon herself, what outrage on her meek decorum. The shrine she had most cherished, held most sacred, was threatened somehow; and God, it seemed, was on the side of the enemy. For had not this man’s piety, sincere beyond question, been his passport, a divine one, to her heart? How could she have allowed his advances else? They were friends of but a few weeks; had met first in the chapel hard by, bent upon a common worship. Some accident, of stress in storm, had been his pretext for a self-introduction; and she?—she had loved the pretext because in this figure she had come to picture her ideal of virtuous manhood. And then words had wakened knowledge, and knowledge admiration, and admiration rapture—the desire of the moth for the star.
He had not spoken of love till this moment; he did not even speak of it now. But all in an instant he leapt to the appeal of her lips, and was fighting for their surrender to him. She struggled a little, uttering no sound. And presently he conquered. Then speech came, breathless and imploring,—
“Forgive me. What have I done? I have done wrong! My God! I couldn’t help it!”
He was the one to break away. She stood motionless, white as a figure of wax.
“Yolande!” he cried, “don’t look at me like that! Say you forgive me!”
She did not stir, but her lips moved.
“Did you do wrong? O! and I thought you knew!”
“I knew?”