As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty had brewed for him.  There was a heady quality in the very ring of her name.  His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings.  He had no difficulty in securing an introduction.  She was a connection of the Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house.  In the few minutes’ talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation of being “talked down to.”  There was the indulgent tolerance of the woman of the world to the “nice boy” about this amazing young woman, who might have been eighteen.  Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a “nice boy.”  But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the “nice boy” as if he were acting the part.  Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justified Bouguereau’s mother-of-pearl flesh tints.  And when she had tilted the ruffled lace parasol over her shoulder, so that it framed her head like a fleecy halo, he had seen that her eyes were green as jade.  Withal he had a sense of having acquitted himself stupidly.

Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on his hardihood.  By Jove!  He had nerve to look at her!  Didn’t he know she was “the” Miss Colebrooke?  Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss Colebrooke’s right of way to the definite article, but it was characteristic of him to make no inquiries.  On the whole, he found the situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements than such situations usually presented.  He was still dallying with this pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine, and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the flight of a comet.  Her contribution was a sonnet entitled “The Miracle.”  As a naive emotional confession, “The Miracle” interested him; as a sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.

Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude.  He rather conspicuously avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again.  To him it was the very least of her gifts.  Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some one else!  By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world.  The pupils shrank to pin-points.  The green looked deep—­as many fathoms as the sea.  She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus.  By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity.  The pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into flame.