“No, I don't. I mean you—y-o-u, second person singular. Haven't you guessed by this time who was the particular gray-eyed girl I had in mind?”
“Of course I have; it was Mabel, wasn't it?”
“Mabel! Oh, hang Mabel! Jane, it was you.”
“Me! Why, Decatur Brown!” Either surprise or indignation rang in her tone. He concluded that it must be the latter.
“Oh, well,” he said, dejectedly, “I had no right to suppose that you'd like it. It's the truth, though, and after so much misunderstanding I am glad you know it. I want you to know that it was you who inspired Sunday Weeks, if any one did. I have never mentioned this before, have not admitted it, even to myself, until now. But I realize that it is true. We have been a long time apart, but the memory of you has never faded for a day, for an hour. So, when I tried to describe the most charming girl of whom I could think, I was describing you. As I wrote, there was constantly before me the vision of your dear gray eyes, and—”
“Decatur! Look at me. Look me straight in the eyes and tell me if they are gray.”
He looked. As a matter of fact, he had been looking into her eyes for several moments. Now there was something so compelling about her tone that he bent all his faculties to the task. This time he looked not with that blindness peculiar to those who love, but, for the moment, discerningly, seeingly. And they were not gray eyes at all. They were a clear, brilliant hazel.
“Why—why!” he gasped out, chokingly. “I—I have always thought of them as gray eyes.”
“If that isn't just like a man!” she exclaimed, shrugging away from him. Her quarter profile revealed those thinly curved lips pursed into a most delicious pout. “You acknowledge, don't you, that they're not gray?” she flung at him over her shoulder—an adorable shoulder, Decatur thought.
“Oh, I admit it,” he groaned.