Thus dared, the young man looked half of mind to accept the challenge, but John Pabodie, shrewdly glancing at the audacious girl, replied, “Nay, mistress, I’m twenty years too old and haply twenty years too young to cope with such a matter. But here’s my son William just come home from Boston and farther, and I’ll leave him to fill the place of Paris, if one may quote the old mythologies in a Christian land.”
“Surely, when such a Helen rises before one’s eyes,” added a sonorous young voice, as Gillian suddenly stood up, her sinuous and suggestive figure displayed in a gown of creamy mull clinging to every curve, and covering yet not concealing the exquisite roundness of arms and shoulders white with that peculiar mat whiteness never seen save in persons of Latin blood.
“Who was Helen?” asked Gillian very slowly, while the velvety darkness of her eyes rested with infantile confidence upon the handsome face of William Pabodie, who, after the pause of an instant, said significantly,—
“The handsomest woman that ever lived.”
A little silence ensued, and all eyes turned upon Gillian, who, nothing daunted, softly replied,—
“She must have been well pleased when Paris told her so.”
“Welcome home, William Pabodie!” cried Lucretia Brewster’s wholesome voice, scattering as with a puff of west wind the strained and bewildering atmosphere that seemed stifling the little group around the Spanish girl. “You know all these lads and lasses, your old neighbors, and I see that you have already made acquaintance with my niece Gillian,—Gillian Brewster, as we call her”—
“My name is Gillian de Cavalcanti,” interposed Gillian quietly, but Lucretia, flushing angrily, continued without looking at her, “If you will come with me, Will, I will take you to Mary and some other friends, Lora Standish and her guest, Mercy Bradford from Plymouth.”
“My sister Anice well-nigh raves over Mistress Lora Standish,” replied the young man, following his hostess, but even as he did so turning to look once more at Gillian, whose eyes, soft and dewy as a chidden child’s, followed him with a vague appeal that sent a tremor through the young man’s heart.
“Can it be that her aunt does not treat her well?” asked he of himself, and his next reply to Lucretia was so cold that she turned and looked at him, and then remembering said to herself,—