“Oh,” I hastened to say, “I know her.” Like all lovers, that subject might have a beginning but no ending.
“You?”
“Of course. Listen. Yellow hair, rippling ravishingly from an alabaster forehead, pink cheeks, pouting lips, dimpled chin, snowy throat—”
The colonel made a gesture of impatience. “Pshaw, that’s a type, not a portrait. Well, the upshot of it was that I was exchanged, and ordered to report at Baltimore for transportation to our lines. Imagine my dismay. No, you can’t, for I was beginning to think she cared for me, and I was every day getting deeper and deeper in love. But to tell her! That posed me. When alone with her, my cowardly tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. Once or twice I came very near bawling out, ‘I love you!’ just as I would have given an order to a squadron to charge a battery.”
“Well; but you did propose at last?”
“Oh yes.”
“And was accepted.”
The colonel lowered his head, and his face grew pinched.
“Refused gently, but positively refused.”
“Come,” I hazarded, thinking the story ended, “I do not like your Helen.”