"That was nice of you, very nice of you, Rosalind. I hope you will keep right on the way you've begun. Now I must ask you not to leave here, and not to allow your father to leave unless I know it."
"But you have your hands full without us. Your first obligation is to Aunt Pat and Helen. My father and I have merely stumbled in where we were not invited. You and I had better say good-by now."
"I am not anxious to say good-by," I answered lamely, and she laughed at me.
Helen, I reflected, did not laugh so readily. Rosalind was beautiful, she was charming; and yet her likeness to Helen failed in baffling particulars. Even as she came through the daisy meadow there had been a difference—at least I seemed to realize it now. The white butterflies symbolized her Ariel-like quality; for the life of me I could not associate those pale, fluttering vagrants with Helen Holbrook.
"We met under the star-r-rs, Mr. Donovan" (this was impudent; my own r's trill, they say), "at the stone seat and by the boat-house, and we talked Shakespeare and had a beautiful time,—all because you thought I was Helen. In your anxiety to be with her you couldn't see that I haven't quite her noble height,—I'm an inch shorter. I gave you every chance there at the boat-house, to see your mistake; but you wouldn't have it so. And you let me leave you there while I went back alone across the lake to Red Gate, right by Battle Orchard, which is haunted by Indian ghosts. You are a most gallant gentleman!"
"When you are quite done, Rosalind!"
"I don't know when I shall have a chance again, Mr. Donovan," she went on provokingly. "I learned a good deal from you in those interviews, but I did have to do a lot of guessing. That was a real inspiration of mine, to insist on playing that Helen by night and Helen by day were different personalities, and that you must not speak to the one of the other. That saved complications, because you did keep to the compact, didn't you?"
I assented, a little grudgingly; and my thoughts went back with reluctant step to those early affairs of mine, which I have already frankly disclosed in this chronicle, and I wondered, with her counterpart before me, how much Helen really meant to me. Rosalind studied me with her frank, merry eyes; then she bent forward and addressed me with something of that prescient air with which my sisters used to lecture me.
"Mr. Donovan, I fear you are a little mixed in your mind this morning, and I propose to set you straight."
"About what, if you please?"