When Glynn walked up the steps at Reine des Fées, feeling a mixture of disgust and pride in his victory achieved, Posey ran out to meet him, slipping her arm in his.
"You’ve triumphed, I see. Oh! John, dear, what daddy needs is a real son like you, and I, just such a brother. Don’t tell me anything about that horrid creature now, let’s be happy for a while. Let us speak of something as far from her as one pole of earth is from the other—of dear Helen Carstairs, whose card I found on the hall table when I went in after leaving you. If it hadn’t been that I was with you, I’d have begrudged missing her for anybody’s sake. Of course the stupid servants said I was not at home. Now, why couldn’t they have shown her into the garden, and then she could have been introduced to you, and how nice that would have been! The two people of all others I most admire, and shall expect and insist upon being friends with each other! Say, John, to please me that you are longing to meet Helen!"
"Posey," began Glynn, and his voice to his own ears sounded unnaturally thin, "I have been waiting a chance to tell you that I have known Miss Carstairs; that I ran upon her by chance at the Gare de Lyons yesterday, just as the train for the South had started. That we were, in fact, companions in the same compartment, and talked of you together, more than once, during our day’s run."
"You! Helen! Wonders will never cease!" cried the girl exultingly. "But," a sobering thought seizing hold of her, "how was it possible you never mentioned her to me in a single one of your letters?"
"Try to think why, Posey," the young man said gravely, as they paused together in the hall filled with dead marbles and living blossoms of the Spring.
"It was Helen, then, Helen?" Her eyes flamed the rest of the sentence.
"Ah! I might have guessed it. And I—was vain enough and rash enough to think I could fill her place to you. Poor, dear John, what you have lost, and what have you got instead?"
"Far more than I merit in any case, dear. It is her secret, and, but that I dared not deceive you, should never have passed my lips. It is over, Posey, buried forty fathoms deep. You see, now, that each of us has need of charity and forbearance with the other, and you must set me an example of kind forgivingness for all I have done or left undone toward you."