“I came to bid you good-bye,” he said at last; it did not occur to him that he had not come for that purpose.
“I am happy to have a chance to—to—beg your pardon,” replied Miss Jones, with a heroic determination to crucify her pride. “I was harsh and unjust to you. Röschen has told me all.”
“I wish she would tell me all. I am as much in the dark as ever.”
“The girl to—to—whom you proposed in the grotto—was—was—not I,” she faltered, grasping the door-knob for support, and gazing into the mirror with a vain hope to hide her blushes.
He drew a long sigh of relief. That intelligence simplified existence enormously. He had had a hopeless feeling, of late, that life was too complex an affair for him to grapple with. Now, as by a flash, order was restored in his chaotic universe. He stood gazing in rapture at Miss Jones’s blushing face, which seemed angelic in its purity and its dignified maidenhood. That there dwelt a sweet young soul behind those blameless features he felt blissfully convinced.
“Miss Jones,” he began, “if Miss Röschen has confessed to you, you know what I would have liked to say to you—that night in the grotto. Now, what would you have answered me?”
A little ray of mirth stole over the girl’s face, and vanished again.
“I should have said—no,” she remarked smilingly.
The orderly universe again tumbled into chaos. She was the veritable Sphinx, and he not the Œdipus to read her riddle.
“Then I will bid you good-bye,” he managed to stammer, extending an unwilling hand and again withdrawing it.