“In the name of the dev—” he began, confusedly, and then bit the word short, and stared at her again. “Is it really you?” he asked at last, reassured in part by her smile.
“Are you sorry to see me?” she asked in turn. Her mind could frame nothing but these soft little meaningless queries.
The young man seemed in doubt how best to answer this question. He turned around and looked abstractedly at his desk; then with a slight detour he walked past her, opened the door, and glanced up and down the dark stairway. When he had closed the door once more, he turned the key in the lock, and then, after momentary reflection, concluded to unlock it again.
“Why, no; why should I be?” he said in a more natural voice, as he returned and stood beside her. Evidently her amiability was a more difficult surprise for him to master than her original advent, and he studied her face with increasing directness of gaze to make sure of it.
“Come and sit down here,” he said, after a few moments of this puzzled inspection, and resumed his own chair. “I want a good look at you,” he explained, as he lifted the shade from the lamp.
Jessica felt that she was blushing under this new radiance, and it required an effort to return his glance. But, when she did so, the changes in his face and expression which it revealed drove everything else from her mind. She rose from her chair upon a sudden impulse, and bent over him at a diffident distance. As she did so, she had the feeling that this bitterness in which she had encased herself for years had dropped from her on the instant like a discarded garment.
“Why, Horace, your hair is quite gray!” she said, as if the fact contained the sublimation of pathos.
“There’s been trouble enough to turn it white twenty times over! You don’t know what I’ve been through, my girl,” he said, sadly. The novel sensation of being sympathized with, welcome as it was, greatly accentuated his sense of deserving compassion.
“I am very sorry,” she said, softly. She had seated herself again, and was gradually recovering her self-possession. The whole situation was so remarkable, not to say startling, that she found herself regarding it from the outside, as if she were not a component part of it. Her pulses were no longer strongly stirred by its personal phases. Most clear of all things in her mind was that she was now perfectly independent of this or any other man. She was her own master, and need ask favors from nobody. Therefore, if it pleased her to call bygones bygones and make a friend of Horace—or even to put a bandage across her eyes and cull from those bygones only the rose leaves and violet blossoms, and make for her weary soul a bed of these—what or who was to prevent her?
Some inexplicable, unforeseen revulsion of feeling had made him pleasant in her sight again. There was no doubt about it—she had genuine satisfaction in sitting here opposite him and looking at him. Had she so many pleasures, then, that she should throw this unlooked-for boon deliberately away?