“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.
“Then--then why don't you go away?” It was just that trembling little
quaver on the low notes which spurred him on to cast the die.
“Jane,” he whispered, “I don't want to go away, and I don't want you to
send me. It isn't gray eyes that I care for, or ever have cared for.
It's been just you, your own dear, charming self.”
“No, it hasn't been. I haven't even a piquant chin.”
“That doesn't matter. What is a piquant chin, anyway?”
“You ought to know; you wrote it.”
“So I did, but I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that it ought to
mean something charming, which you are.”
“I'm not. And I am not accomplished. I don't sing, I don't play, I don't
draw.”
“Thanks be for that! I don't, either. But I think you are the dearest
girl in the world.”
At that she turned to him and smiled a little as only Jane could smile.
“You told me that once before, a long time ago, you know.”
“And you have not forgotten?”
“No. I--you see--I didn't want to forget.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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