"And I might have loved him." She was still glowing with the fires that Olaf had lighted in her.
"But you are going to marry Anthony."
"Yes," she said, "I am going to marry Anthony. I am going to flirt and smoke cigarettes and let him—flirt—when I might have been a—goddess."
It was after breakfast on the same day that a letter came to me, delivered into my own hands by messenger. It was from Olaf, and he left it to me whether Nancy should see it. It covered many pages and it shook my soul, but I did not show it to Nancy.
There were nights after that when I found it hard to sleep, nights in which I thought of Olaf sailing toward the hidden land, holding in his heart a hope which it was in my power to crown with realization or dash to the ground. Yet I had Nancy's happiness to think of, and, in a sense, Anthony's. It seemed almost incredible that I must carry, too, on my heart, the burden of the happiness of Olaf Thoresen.
When Anthony came back, he and Nancy were caught in a net of engagements, and I saw very little of them. Of course they romped in now and then with their own particular crowd, and treated me, as it were, to a cross-section of modern life. Except for two things, I should have judged that Nancy had put away all thoughts of Olaf, but these two things were significant. She had stopped smoking, and she no longer touched her cheeks with artificial bloom.
Anthony's amazement, when he offered her a cigarette and she refused, had in it a touch of irritation. "But, my dear girl, why not?"
"Well, I have to think of my complexion, Tony."
I think he knew it was not that and was puzzled. "I never saw you looking better in my life."
She was wearing a girdle of blue with her clear, crisp white, and her fairness was charming. She had, indeed, the look which belongs to young Catholic girls dedicated to the Virgin who wear her colors.