“That’s Nathan Peck,” said Mabella, “on the left.”
Sidney saw him; a serious, sunburnt man, with mild, light-coloured eyes and straight, straggly hair. He was very thin, and wore a woollen muffler around his neck.
“Do you see that scarf? Temperance gave him that three years ago; he’s never been seen without it since.” Mabella whispered this hastily to Sidney.
“Warm devotion, isn’t it?” inquired Sidney as he rose to go and meet his host.
“Isn’t he fun?” asked Mabella of Vashti.
“It all depends on taste,” said Vashti, indifferently. Mabella did not hear her. She was gazing at her cousin Lanty as he came towards her some yards in advance of the others. Clad in blue jeans, with his shirt open at the throat and his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, Lanty was a man to win ninety-nine women out of a hundred. The odd woman would see, perhaps, too great a capacity for enjoyment in his face; too little of self restraint, too much generosity, too little cool judgment; but if she were discerning enough, she might pierce yet deeper to that natural nobility of character which, through miry places and sloughs of despond, would yet triumphantly set Lanty Lansing upon the solid rock of men’s respect.
“Well—you’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said, flinging himself at the feet of his cousins. “It’s worth working for to get over to the shade—and you.”
His first words had seemed to address Mabella; his glance took in both his cousins, and each girl took the meaning of the words home to her heart, and doled out a niggard portion to the other. Mabella’s confidence had given place to a shy eagerness to please the man she loved. Her eyes dwelt upon him, eager to catch each glance, and she felt that as often as his eyes lighted upon her an unconscious tenderness deepened his voice.
The situation was perfectly apparent to Sidney when he arrived with old Lansing a moment later. Yet Vashti Lansing’s blinded eyes saw nothing of it. Rapt in a superb egotism, she erred much in underestimating her fellows. A more dangerous thing, perhaps, than to over-estimate ourselves. Some instinct made her aware of the splendour of her form; besides that, the women of her race had all been mageful creatures. She had an unfaltering belief in the potentiality of her own will. Long ago they had burned one of her forbears as a witch-woman. They said she caused her spirit to enter into her victims and commit crimes, crimes which were naively calculated to tend to the worldly advantage of the witch. Vashti thought of her martyred ancestress often; she herself sometimes felt a weird sensation as of illimitable will power, as of an intelligence apart from her normal mind, an intelligence which wormed out the secrets of those about her, and made the fixed regard of her large full eyes terrible. The film of vanity dimmed them somewhat, but when some rude hand should rend that veil away, their regard might be blasting.