“Sure, and this is a sight for sore eyes!” he cried, with a would-be adaptation of an Irish accent. “You’re welcome, Pixie—a hundred times welcome. We’re overjoyed to see you, dear.”
Pixie beamed at him, with an attention somewhat diverted by the two young men who stared at her from a few yards’ distance. One was tall and fair, the other dark and thick set, and when Esmeralda swept forward to make the formal introductions it appeared that the first rejoiced in the name of Stanor Vaughan, and the second in the much more ordinary one of Robert Carr.
“My sister Patricia,” once more announced Mrs Hilliard, and though the young men ascribed Pixie’s blush to a becoming modesty, it arose in reality from annoyance at the sound of the high-sounding title which had been so persistently dropped all her life. Surely Esmeralda was not going to insist upon “Patricia!”
For a few moments everybody remained standing, the men relating their experiences of the afternoon, while Esmeralda waited for some further additions to the tea-table, and Pixie’s quick-seeing eyes roamed here and there gathering impressions to be stored away for later use. She was too excited, too interested, to talk herself, but her ears were as quick as her eyes, and so it happened that she caught a fragment of conversation between Miss Ward and the tall Mr Vaughan, which was certainly not intended for her ears.
”...A sister!” he was repeating in tones of incredulous astonishment. “A sister! But how extraordinarily unlike! She must have thrown in her own beauty to add to Mrs Hilliard’s share!”
“Oh, hush!” breathed the girl urgently. “She heard!”
Stanor Vaughan lifted his head sharply and met Pixie’s watching eyes fixed upon him. His own glance was tense and shamed, but to his amazement hers was friendly, humorous, undismayed. There was no displeasure in her face, no hint of humiliation nor discomfiture—nothing, it would appear, but serene, unruffled agreement.
Stanor Vaughan had not a good memory: few events of his youth remained with him after middle life, but when he was an old, old man that moment still remained vivid, when, in the place of rebuke, he first met the radiance of Pixie. O’Shaughnessy’s broad, sweet smile.