"Please," she said, gently, "don't mind about that. I liked you better for it. I like people to say what they think. I've--"
"Do you? Then allow me to say that I'm not quite a bitter fool...."
The young man was advancing toward her, throwing out his hands in a quaint sort of gesture which seemed to say that he had had about as much of this as he could stand.
"For surely I don't think I am--I don't think I'm quite so dumb and blind as you must think me...." His repressed air was breaking up rapidly, and now he flung out with unmistakable feeling: "Do you suppose I could ever forget what you did last May! Not if I tried a thousand years!" said Mr. V.V.... "How could I possibly think anything of you, after that, but all that is brave and beautiful?..."
The two stood looking at each other. Color came into Cally's cheek; came but soon departed. The long gold-and-black lashes, which surely had been made for ornaments, fluttered and fell.
Out of the dead silence she said, with some difficulty:
"It's very sweet of you to say that."
Cally moved away from him, toward the door, deeply touched. She had wanted to hear such words as these, make no doubt of that. Among all her meetings with this man last year, she had only that May morning to remember without a stinging sense of her inferiority. And she supposed that he had forgotten....
"You see," she said, not without an effort, "I have been telling you my troubles, after all.... I--I'm afraid I've kept them waiting for you upstairs. I must go."
But she did not leave the parlor at once, even when Hen, hearing the door creak open, cried down that the infirmary was ready....