“Well, I have changed,” said Amethyst. “It is all gone by, I can’t go back. I had to turn into a different person, and I can’t put back the clock. I shouldn’t fall in love with you, if I met you now. But I wish I had died when I did love you.”
She darted back into the shelter of the lights and the crowd, and soon she saw Lucian and his friend bow to her mother and go. Sir Richard Grattan came up to her to say good-night.
“May I come to-morrow?” he said, with meaning.
Amethyst looked full at him, as if she were then and there appraising him, and making up her mind. Then, very slowly and distinctly, she said—
“Yes.”
No! Lucian was not her Romeo, and she was not to find her deliverance in the flood-tide of passion. A girl with weaker brain, or of less concentrated feeling, might have doubted and wondered, and tried to conjure up the old magic, but Amethyst was too clever and too intense for self-deception.
Lucian was nothing to her but a handsome boy, and the love of her girlhood was gone for ever. She had left it behind her.