With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our acquai'--hh--Gallatin--hh--" But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no, it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt. At the same her kind eyes sweetly granted me a stripling's acquittal--oh! why did it have to be a stripling's?
Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said--at the same time saying many other things but saying this always plainest--"I see both out and in; I know myself--and thee." Never but in one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.
"Don't you love to see Charlotte and him look at each other in that steady way when they're talking together?" Camille asked me later. But rather coldly I inquired why I should; I felt acutely enough without admitting it to Camille, that Charlotte and Ferry were meeting on ground far above me; and when Gholson, in his turn, called to my notice, in Charlotte's case, this unique gaze, and contrasted it with her beautiful yet strangely childish mouth, I asked a second time why she was here, anyhow.
"She's here," murmured Gholson, "because she has to live! To live she must have means, Smith, and to have means she must either get them herself or she must--" and again he poised his hand horizontally across his mouth and whispered--"live with her hus'--"
I jerked my head away--"Yes, yes." Scott Gholson was the only one of us who could give that wretch that title. "Gholson," I said, for I kept him plied with questions to prevent his questioning me, "how did that man ever get her?"
The rest of the company were going into the house; he glanced furtively after them and grabbed my arm; you would have thought he was about to lay bare the whole tragedy in five words; "Smith,--nobody knows!"