I remembered that Mildred had once likened him to a young Norse god, and I did not wonder. As for Mildred, after the first greetings were over and we had ensconced ourselves on a tête-à-tête for an evening’s talk, I soon perceived that a certain indefinable change had come over her. I could hardly tell what it was at first.
There was a vivacity and charm and sprightliness that I had never seen before. I had always thought her charming, though perhaps a bit too reserved and dignified. Some people had thought her cold, but I knew better. Now all the latent passion and warmth of her nature had been aroused, and I saw that she had possibilities of which I had not dreamed.
“What is it, Mildred?” I asked, after Ralph had left us alone. “Somehow you seem—I scarcely know what to say—you seem so young and happy, as if”—
Mildred finished, “as if I had been drinking of the elixir of life and had become a new creature. Yes, dear,” she added, “and so I have. Oh, I am so happy, so unspeakably happy!”
Then suddenly turning impulsively and throwing her arms around me, her face shining with a new light, she exclaimed, “How I wish every one else were as happy too.
“Sometimes it seems as if it were too much, as if in this sorrowful world I had no right to be so supremely happy. So often in these last months,” she added musingly, “I have said to myself those lines that seemed written for me alone:
“‘The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul, ...
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,