"Ask him to come up," Angela answered, feeling virtuously firm in her resolve that really had not weakened once in the last five days!
The pretty white room was full of rose-coloured twilight, so pink, it seemed, that if you closed your hand tightly you might find a little ball of crushed rose-petals there when you opened it. It would be a pity to shut out so much loveliness by switching on the electricity, so when Nick came he found Angela, a tall, slim black figure, with a faint gold nimbus round its head, silhouetted against a background of flaming sky. Standing as she did with her back to the window, he could hardly see her face, but the sunset streamed full into his as he crossed the room, holding out his hand.
His dark face and deep-lighted eyes looked almost unearthly to Angela seen in this wonderful light. No man could really be as handsome as he seemed! She must remember that he had never been so before, never would be again. It was only an effect. "It's like meeting him transformed, in another world," was the thought that flashed through her head. And the immense height of this great house on a hill, the apparent distance from the veiled city beneath, with its starlike lights beginning to glitter through clouds of shadow, all intensified the fancy. For an instant it was as if they two met alone together on a mountain-top, immeasurably high above the tired, struggling crowd of human things where once their place had been.
Strange what fantastic ideas jump into your mind! Angela was ashamed; and her embarrassment, mingling with admiration of Nick which must be hidden, chilled her greeting into commonplace. Yet she could hardly take her eyes from his good looks.
Nick had dressed himself for evening in some of those clothes bought in haste, ready-made, to please a woman who had laughed at them and at him, during his abbreviated visit in New York. The woman did not laugh now. She forgot that she had ever laughed; and the thought was in her mind that the large white oval of evening shirt set off his head like a marble pedestal.
"How do you do?" she said, giving him her hand, and holding it rather high, in the English way, which seemed excessively formal to Nick. "I'm glad to see you again."
Nick's heart went down. Her voice did not sound glad. This was just what he had expected, though not what he had hoped. She had changed toward him the day they parted, and though she had flung him a word of encouragement, evidently she had gone on changing more and more. There seemed little good in asking what he had come to ask; but he had to get through with it now.
"I guess I don't need to tell you I'm glad to see you," he said. He looked at that nimbus round her head, as she stood with her back to the window. He could say no more, though he had meant to add something.
"What are you thinking about?" she questioned him almost sharply.
Nick laughed, embarrassed. "I was thinking some words that sound like poetry—or no, they were thinking themselves. Night in her eyes, morning in her hair! Because standing like you do, Mrs. May, a kind of gold powder wreath seems to be floating around your head."