Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by invitations——"
"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now, if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"
Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best knew. In the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked small and very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish white gown and that heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She hoped she did....
Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face she saw for the first time.
She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of a young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair head tilted a little backward, and his eyes—strange eyes!—were looking straight into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with something about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up vaguely as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have borrowed light and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now all that keenness of theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into the wondering, receptive glance of a girl....
Who was this?
Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their hostess up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have held her own, for longer than a minute....
Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age before that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her hostess's, "I want to introduce Mr.——"
(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)
"He's nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first impression.