“Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have seen the girl that wrote that letter.”
“Not Jerusha Brown?”
“Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.”
“Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or interrupt you, but you must—you really must-tell me everything. Don’t leave out the slightest detail.”
“I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.
“You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.”
“Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.
He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel—”
“Yes, yes!”
“And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly—that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”