"I am only angry with myself: I am not behaving well to-night."
She came in front of me and looked up in my face. "I don't want you to think," she said in a little faint trembling voice, "that—that I—that I—" She quite broke down.
"I really don't know what you mean, Helen."
"Floyd," she cried passionately, "I think I would die before I would wilfully hurt your feelings!"
"Why, my poor little girl," said I, quite touched at the sight of her quivering face and the sound of her impassioned voice, "you did not hurt my feelings for an instant. What I said was in answer to my own thoughts. I like to say such things to myself at times, and remember that I do not possess the advantages of other men. Besides, facts are facts: I am lame. I cannot dance, and although I can walk, it is with a limping gait: I should be a poor fellow in a foot-race. I don't suppose that my being a cripple will forfeit me anything in the kingdom of heaven, but, nevertheless, it obliges me to forego a good many pleasures here on earth."
"You are not a cripple!" she burst out impetuously. "You have every advantage! What is it that you cannot dance? I despise men who whirl about like puppets: I have never seen them waltzing but they must make themselves ridiculous. I am glad you cannot dance: you are on the level of too much dignity and noble behavior to condescend to such petty things. And surely you do not want to run a foot-race!" she added with an intensity of disdain which made me laugh, high-wrought and painful although my mood was. Then her lip trembled, and I saw tears in her eyes as she went on. "If you were a cripple," she pursued in a low, eager voice, "really a helpless cripple, everybody would love you just the same. Why, Floyd, what do you think it is to me that, as you say, you do not possess the advantages of other men? Have you forgotten how it all came about? I was a little girl then, but there is nothing that happened yesterday clearer to my memory than that terrible morning when I cost you so dear. I know how I felt—as if forsaken by the world. I wondered if God looked down and saw me, alone, in danger, blind and dizzy and trembling, so that again and again I seemed to be slipping away from everything that held me. I could not have stayed one minute more had I not heard your voice. You were so strong, so kind, Floyd! When you reached me your hands were bleeding, your face scratched and torn, your breath came in great pants, but you looked at me and smiled. And then you carried me to the top and put me in safety, and I let you go down, down, down!" She was quite speechless, and leaned her cheek against my hand, which she still held, and wet it freely with her tears.
"If you mind your lameness," she said brokenly, with intervals of sobs—"if you feel that Fate is cruel to you—that there is any reason why you cannot be perfectly happy—then I wish," she exclaimed with energy, "that I had never been born to do you this great injury. I love my life, I love papa, I love your mother and you, and it seems to me as if I were going to be a very happy woman; but still, if you carry any regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass growing over me."
What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer night like this."
When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just then—thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,—while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in and sat down beside me.
"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."