'
'Oh,' he murmured.
She waited a minute. Then, 'Tell me,' she urged.
'Do you remember Mary Isona?' he asked.
She glanced up at him suddenly, as if startled. 'Mary Isona? Yes, of
course.'
'Well, I was in love with her.'
'You were in love with Mary Isona?'
'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm
afraid.'
She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a
slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face,
luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair--Mary
Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only
relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was professional. She
came into it for an hour or two at a time now and then, to play or to
give a music lesson.
'Yes,' he repeated; 'I was in love with her. I have never been in love
with any other woman. It seems ridiculous for an old man to say it,
but I am in love with her still. An old man? Are we ever really old?
Our body grows old, our skin wrinkles, our hair turns white; but the
mind, the spirit, the heart? The thing we call "I"? Anyhow, not a day,
not an hour, passes, but I think of her, I long for her, I mourn for
her. You knew her--you knew what she was. Do you remember her playing?
Her wonderful eyes? Her beautiful pale face? And how the hair grew
round her forehead? And her talk, her voice, her intelligence! Her
taste, her instinct, in literature, in art--it was the finest I have
ever met.
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