Henriette was going out into the garden and Phil might come to her with the words, "Don't forget; you said yes!" precipitating an awkward crisis. The force which he had put into his words was proof that he was no faint-hearted lover.
"Why don't you speak? You look as if you had seen ghosts!" Henriette persisted.
Helen's way of mending the error of one impulse had ever been with another impulse.
"Not here!" she gasped. "In my room! Yes, Henriette, you must know!"
When they were in the room and Helen, haggard and choking, faced Henriette, calm and wondering, the contrast between the two was at a climax. Something like appeal for sympathy appeared in Helen's eyes as she struggled for a beginning. Then without beginning she broke into laughter, which was prolonged until she was forced to wipe her eyes.
"Well, I hope you have not gone out of your head!" said Henriette. "I refuse to see the fun of the thing until I know what it is."
Laughter had pointed the way for Helen.
"It would be funny if it were not so awful," she said. Between laughs, hectic laughs, she told the story of what had happened under the tree. "The joke was too good, shameful as it was. I couldn't help it. I said only a few words and looking the other way—it was so dark—he mistook my voice for yours—and what is to be done now?"
Henriette's eyes were narrow slits, become like her mother's, and her lips tightly compressed made her mouth a short gash and drew down her nose till the cartilage of the thin bridge showed white.
"Yes, what to do!" she said icily. "Why do you come to me?"