Throughout his call he was dignified and friendly, but she was in a state of nervous excitement which bordered on hysteria.
"You are nervous and overwrought," he said in a friendly way. "Perhaps I would better go. I'll come again soon, and you shall name the day, and we will make plans for our future."
He shook hands in parting, and Belle ran up-stairs as if her life depended upon it. Once in her own room, she locked the door, then threw herself down among her sofa pillows in a passion of tears.
"A—cause—of—disease—of—disease," she sobbed. "Oh, the—brute!"
She had kept her lips for her husband, and the wound went deep. When she descended the stairs, calm and collected, her eyes were set and resolute, and there was a look around her mouth that boded ill for Mr. Thomas Elliott, of Harvard, '94.
The next day he asked her to drive.
"I don't want to hurry you in the least," he said, "and the time is left to you. Only tell me a little time before, that is all. And Belle, remember this: I am going to be perfectly and absolutely truthful with you, and I expect you to be the same with me."
It was not long before she found out that he meant what he said.
"Do I look nice?" she asked him one evening, when they were starting for the theatre.
"I am sorry to say that you do not," answered Elliott. "You've got too much powder on your nose, and that hat is a perfect fright."