“No one knew how I would throw myself down in the long grass in the depths of the silent wood, for the birds never told my secret, and cry out to the pitying skies to send me from heaven just one wish, grant me one prayer, and that was for some human being to love, some one who would love me in return; for some one to hold my hands, and ask me in a kind and gentle voice if I were weary, and if I were, to pillow my head on a kindly breast and soothe me while I wept out my woe there. The young girls I read of had happy homes, tender mothers, kind fathers, sisters dear, brothers, and—lovers; why, then, was this height of human happiness beyond my reach? I longed for companionship, and girl friends.”
“Had you no thought of—a lover?” queried Queenie, ever so softly.
“Yes,” whispered Jess, almost shyly. “I had my ideal of the kind of a man who would captivate my heart; a girl who reads much has her ideal, you know. I often said to myself: ‘If there is a Prince Charming in this world for me, he must be tall, and grave, and handsome, with blue eyes, and chestnut hair waving above a broad, white brow, and——’ Why, what in the world is the matter, Queenie? You look as though you were dying.”
CHAPTER XXXV.
HIS STORY.
The girl sprang to her feet, looking at Queenie in great affright.
“You were about to faint. You are ill?” cried Jess, in alarm.
“It was only a momentary faintness, dear,” murmured Queenie.
But the truth of the matter was that Jess had described John Dinsmore so accurately, just as she had seen him when she had parted from him on the golden sands at Newport, that never-to-be-forgotten evening when she had flung from her the heart and the love in it that she would have afterward given worlds, had she possessed them, to recall.
She wondered if Jess could by any possible means have ever met the real John Dinsmore; but in the next breath she told herself that it could not have been; the girl was just conjuring up this mental photograph of the hero who could win her heart purely from her imagination, never dreaming that there had been a man in existence who had fitted that description exactly.
Thus, assured that Queenie’s indisposition was but momentary, and that she really cared for her to go on with her narrative, Jess continued: