The Mission School, familiarly designated as the Chapel, was not an academic institution of classics and national renown, but it was of State-wide repute and an oasis of preparatory learning amidst the barren lives of mountain youth, hitherto isolated and deprived of the advantages of his more fortunate Blue-Grass cousins.
Miss Virginia Worth, in charge of the Chapel, was as agreeably impressed with Belle-Ann as the girl was pleased with the charming teacher. Miss Worth was a woman of thirty-seven, with an abundance of perfectly white hair and the fresh, smooth face of a girl of twenty. Upon this benign, wholesome countenance there dwelt an ever-present sympathy and love for mankind. In her gray eyes was a look of succor that beckoned suffering to her. Oddly enough, a woman of private wealth, she had made the uplift of the mountain folk her life work.
Moreover, Miss Worth was a woman of deep and unerring penetration,—of careful and soothing diplomacy—she had made a life study of the ways of the human heart. With true divinity, she had stepped out into the world, smiling, amidst the trivialities and dissensions, and weaknesses that assail and tempt and twist and scar the lives of humanity.
In the fountain of her spontaneous Christian soul, she had a lotion for them all. From the first, it was this benevolent woman's smile that drew Belle-Ann to her—a look that reminded the girl keenly of Maw Lutts' perennial smile, and spread an aftermath that carried her back to days of utter happiness.
Ill things of the soul are oft concealed through the measures of a lifetime. Thus, when its tenancy is predestined,—but when a spirit is unmated to evil, its odious residue gravitates like cork to the surface and speedily floats in the eyes.
From the beginning there was an indefinable underlying something permeating this sweet-faced girl that had come to her from out of the wilderness—a something that sorely puzzled the good Miss Worth. It was like a single elusive carbon spot hidden away in the core of an otherwise perfect diamond—a spot that reflected through the eyes in fleeting transitory glints—a mote-flash that could not be located—baffling discernment only under powerful, expert analysis.
Miss Worth loved the girl. She loved her straightway from the minute that she had held her small, shapely hand, and listened to the timbre of that shy, dulcet voice. She had never seen eyes tinted like these. She marvelled at her curls. Her perfect delicate, Grecian features filled Miss Worth with a lasting wonder.
Through the Reverend Peterson she heard the tragic history of the girl's comely mother, but she could not conceive a heredity sufficiently generous to give the beauty made adorably manifest in this girl of the hills. In every movement her natural artless grace was as a rhythm of poetry.
Miss Worth then recognized an extraordinary character—the fibre of a beautiful, wonderful, lovable womanhood—a girl who could, with the embellishments of education and adornments of fashion, go into the sphere of any secular circle of society in any municipality and create a furore. She was quick to foresee an interesting future for her new protégée, if she could only discover the elusive defect that she could not name, but which was palpably present to her keen senses, versed in thought reading and the pathology of organic character ailments.
Very many times, as the days slipped by, she observed flashes of that sober, mystifying light in Belle-Ann's eyes—a sudden quick, almost vindictive dropping of the sweet lips that showed, otherwise, a dimpled upturn. It followed that Miss Worth devoted extra care to Belle-Ann's tutorage—all the while bent upon deftly angling for that alien, shifting thing that a casual observer would have passed unnoticed.