"It is simply something I wrote on 'Abnormal Influences upon the Will;' it covers a pretty wide ground as to the question of human responsibility and the recovery of criminals, and all that."
Mr. St. John remembered at this moment the case of the poor woman whom he had visited that afternoon, and the periodical fatality which was making her family life a shipwreck, and he turned to Dr. Campbell a face so full of eager inquiry and dawning thought that Eva felt that the propitious moment was come to leave them together, and instantly she moved from her seat between them, to welcome a new comer who was entering the room.
"I've got them together," she whispered to Harry a few minutes after, as she saw that the two were turned towards each other, apparently intensely absorbed in conversation.
The two might have formed a not unapt personification of flesh and spirit. Dr. Campbell, a broad-shouldered, deep-breathed, long-limbed man, with the proudly set head and quivering nostrils of a high-blooded horse—an image of superb physical vitality: St. John, so delicately and sparely built, with his Greek forehead and clear blue eye, the delicate vibration of his cleanly cut lips, and the cameo purity of every outline of his profile. Yet was he not without a certain air of vigor, the outshining of spiritual forces. One could fancy Campbell as the Berserker who could run, race, wrestle, dig, and wield the forces of nature, and St. John as the poet and orator who could rise to higher regions and carry souls upward with him. It takes both kinds to make up a world.
And now glided into the company the vision of two women in soft, dove-colored silks, with white crape kerchiefs crossed upon their breasts, and pressed crape caps bordering their faces like a transparent aureole. There was the neighbor, Ruth Baxter, round, rosy, young, blooming, but dressed in the straitest garb of her sect. With her back turned, you might expect to see an aged woman stricken in years, so prim and antique was the fashion of her garments; but when her face was turned, there was the rose of youth blooming amid the cool snows of cap and kerchief. The smooth pressed hair rippled and crinkled in many a wave, as if it would curl if it dared, and the round blue eyes danced with a scarce suppressed light of cheer that might have become mirthfulness, if set free; but yet the quaint primness of her attire set off her womanly charms beyond all arts of the toilet.
Her companion was a matronly person, who might be fifty or thereabouts. She had that calm, commanding serenity that comes to woman only from the habitual exaltation of the spiritual nature. Sibyl Selwyn was known in many lands as one of the most zealous and best accepted preachers of her sect. Her life had been an inspiration of pity and mercy; and she had been in far countries of the earth, where there was sin to be reproved or sorrow to be consoled, a witness to testify and a medium through whom guilt and despair might learn something of the Divine Pity.
She bore about with her a power of personal presence very remarkable. Her features were cast in large and noble mould; her clear cut, wide-open gray eyes had a penetrating yet kind expression, that seemed adapted both to search and to cheer, and went far to justify the opinion of her sect, which attributed to Sibyl in an eminent degree the apostolic gift of the discerning of spirits. Somehow, with her presence there seemed to come an atmosphere of peace and serenity, such as one might fancy clinging about even the raiment of one just stepped from a higher sphere. Yet, so gliding and so dove-like was the movement by which the two had come in—so perfectly, cheerfully, and easily had they entered into the sympathies of the occasion, that their entrance made no more break or disturbance in the social circle than the stealing in of a ray of light through a church window.
Eva had risen and gone to them at once, had seated them at the opposite side of the little tea-table and poured their tea, chatting the while and looking into their serene faces with a sincere cordiality which was reflected back from them in smiles of confidence.
Sibyl admired the pictures, flowers, and grasses on her tea-cup with the naïve interest of a child; for one often remarks, in intercourse with her sect, how the æsthetic sense, unfrittered and unworn by the petting of self-indulgence, is prompt to appreciate beauty.
Eva felt a sort of awed pleasure in Sibyl's admiration of her pretty things, as if an angel guide were stooping to play with her. She felt in her presence like one of earth's unweaned babies.