Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/244

234 "Jim must have sent to Paris for that for her," said I to myself. "Lucky fellow that he is with his money!" I was wrong. It was a toilette that Ally had devised, and her own hands had wrought the poppies in scarlet and gold.

The President rolled out his sonorous Latin sentences; my old classmates came and went on the stage; disquisitions, discussions, orations, were all alike to me. I heard the words as one hears words in a dream. I was fully conscious of but one sense, and that was the sense of Ally's personality. It was not the fascination of her beauty; it was, as it always remained, the vivid sense of her as of an expansion of my consciousness of myself. This is the nearest analysis which words can give of the bond which held me to Ally. As I stood with my eyes dreamily fixed on the scarlet and gold poppies of her scarf, I recalled the wealth of scarlet oak-leaves which she had worn on that autumn morning, and I knew that the two hours were linked together by a bond as enduring as eternity. While I was thinking of the strange coincidence in material color of these two most vivid pictures in my brain, I was suddenly conscious of another sharp, electric thrill; not running as before, up my arm, but seeming to come from the floor beneath my feet. It was very sharp,—so sharp that I involuntarily leaned against the wall to steady myself for a second and shut my eyes. When I opened them I saw that Ally's head was turned; she seemed to be eagerly