Julia Bride

I

She had walked with her friend to the top of the wide steps of the
Museum, those that descended from the galleries of painting, and then,
after the young man had left her, smiling, looking back, waving all
gayly and expressively his hat and stick, had watched him, smiling
too, but with a different intensity--had kept him in sight till he
passed out of the great door. She might have been waiting to see if he
would turn there for a last demonstration; which was exactly what he
did, renewing his cordial gesture and with his look of glad devotion,
the radiance of his young face, reaching her across the great space,
as she felt, in undiminished truth. Yes, so she could feel, and she
remained a minute even after he was gone; she gazed at the empty air
as if he had filled it still, asking herself what more she wanted and
what, if it didn't signify glad devotion, his whole air could have
represented.

She was at present so anxious that she could wonder if he stepped and
smiled like that for mere relief at separation; yet if he desired in
that degree to break the spell and escape the danger why did he keep
coming back to her, and why, for that matter, had she felt safe
a moment before in letting him go? She felt safe, felt almost
reckless--that was the proof--so long as he was with her; but the
chill came as soon as he had gone, when she took the measure,
instantly, of all she yet missed. She might now have been taking it
afresh, by the testimony of her charming clouded eyes and of the
rigor that had already replaced her beautiful play of expression. Her
radiance, for the minute, had "carried" as far as his, travelling on
the light wings of her brilliant prettiness--he, on his side, not
being facially handsome, but only sensitive, clean and eager. Then,
with its extinction, the sustaining wings dropped and hung.

She wheeled about, however, full of a purpose; she passed back through
the pictured rooms, for it pleased her, this idea of a talk with Mr.
Pitman--as much, that is, as anything could please a young person so
troubled. It happened indeed that when she saw him rise at sight of
her from the settee where he had told her five minutes before that she
would find him, it was just with her nervousness that his presence
seemed, as through an odd suggestion of help, to connect itself.
Nothing truly would be quite so odd for her case as aid proceeding
from Mr. Pitman; unless perhaps the oddity would be even greater for
himself--the oddity of her having taken into her head an appeal to
him.

She had had to feel alone with a vengeance--inwardly alone and
miserably alarmed--to be ready to "meet," that way, at the first
sign from him, the successor to her dim father in her