“And so, Harry—if—if to help papa—and Millwood is sold—and I can get a good place in the mill—one off by myself—what they call drawer-in—at good wages,—and, if only for a little while I'd work there—to help out, you know—what would you think?”
He sprang up from his seat and dropped her hand.
“Good God, Helen Conway, are you crazy?” he said brutally—“why, I'd never speak to you again. Me? A Travis?—and marry a mill girl?”
The color went out of her face. She looked in her shame and sorrow toward the sunset, where a cloud, but ten minutes before, had stood all rosy and purple with the flush of the sunbeams behind it.
Now the beams were gone, and it hung white and bloodless.
In the crisis of our lives such trifles as these flash over us. In the greatness of other things—often turning points in our life—Nature sometimes points it all with a metaphor.
For Nature is the one great metaphor.
Helen knew that she and the cloud were now one.
But she was not a coward, and with her heart nerved and looking him calmly in the face, she talked on and told him of the wretched condition of affairs at Millwood. And as she talked, the setting sun played over her own cheeks, touching them with a halo of such exquisite colors that even the unpoetic soul of Harry Travis was touched by the beauty of it all.
And to any one but Harry Travis the proper solution would have been plain. Not that he said it or even meant it—for she was too proud a spirit even to have thought of it—there is much that a man should know instinctively that a woman should never know at all.