There had grown in her a beauty of a dark, foreign type. The delicate olive of her skin and the dense blackness of her eyes and hair caused her to be considered a novelty worth commenting upon by the men of Broxton society, which was of a highly critical nature. She went out a great deal as the spring advanced and began to know the place and people better. She developed a pathetic eagerness to make friends and understand those around her. One day, she went alone to Broxton Chapel and after sitting through one of Mr. Hixon's most sulphurous sermons, came home in a brooding mood.
"Why did you go?" Murdoch was roused to ask.
"I thought," she answered, "it might make me better. I thought I would try."
Not long afterward, when he had gone out of the house and she was left sitting with Mrs. Murdoch, she suddenly looked up from the carpet on which her eyes had been fixed and asked her a question.
"Is it true that I am beginning to be very handsome?" she demanded.
"Yes," Mrs. Murdoch answered, "it is true."
A dark cloud settled upon her face and her eyes fell again.
"I heard some men in the street speak aloud to each other about it," she said. "Do they speak so of all women who are handsome?"
"I don't know," her companion replied, surveying her critically and with some anxiety.
"They used to speak so of—her," she said, slowly. "She was a beautiful woman. They were always telling her of it again and again, and I used to go and look at myself in the glass and be glad that I was thin and dark and ugly and that they laughed at me. I wanted to be hideous. Once, when I was a child, a man said: 'Never mind, she will be a beauty some day—like her mother!' and I flew at him and struck him, and then I ran away to my room and fell down upon my knees and said the first prayer I ever said in my life. I said, 'O God!—if there is a God—strike me dead! O God!—if there is a God—strike me dead!'"