He looked sallow and savage; his large dark eyes glittered like a tiger’s upon the spring. There was a dull red mark upon his forehead, where Hugh Rivers dale’s blow had fallen, when he felled him to the earth, and he apparently took no pains to conceal it. He seemed to wear it as a badge of distinction, that might attract all eyes and many questions, enabling him thus to answer them in terms which would tear all Mrs. Grahame’s panoply of pride into shreds, and trample them scornfully under foot.
How troubled she felt on seeing him!—how disqustedly she listened to his words!—with what sickening apprehension she gazed upon the cicatrised wound upon his forehead! She felt, as he passed into the room beyond, that her expectations of a proud triumph were likely to be turned into torturing anticipations of shame and degradation.
Her pride now changed her from a Juno to an Ate. There was no telling into what extravagances, during this man’s presence, it might hurry her.
As Lester Vane sauntered on, he caught sight of Evangeline, who looked pale and abstracted. He advanced towards her, and spoke to her with low musical tones. He bent his eyes upon her with the fascination of a serpent’s gaze, but she shrank from him in undisguised aversion—horrified aversion—there could certainly be no mistaking the expression; so decided was it in character, that he, in the fullness of his immeasurable conceit, actually looked over his shoulder, expecting there to see some hugely-moustached, be-whiskered object as the real cause of her disgust, but there was no one but himself to fasten upon, and he grated his teeth at the conviction.
“Sweet Miss Evangeline,” he lisped, “I hail our réunion with a gratification I am unable to express.”
He tendered his hand, but she recoiled from it and him as though he were indeed a noxious reptile. Helen had spoken of him to her in hot and blistering words. She now feared and loathed him.
She moved hastily to the side of her mother, and Lester Vane, muttering an oath, sallied into the reception-room.
The dinner was announced—was eaten; and, at a somewhat late hour, dancing commenced. Lester Vane sought Evangeline for a partner. She distinctly declined to dance with him, and he turned away infuriated.
Not that she danced at all: her brain was in a whirl of confusion. She was alarmed by the agitation displayed by her mother, who, flushed and excited as she had never seen her before, followed Lester Vane like a shadow; and, whenever he commenced conversation with a group of guests, interposed and broke it up, to follow him still.
She was much startled and nervously frightened, too, by her father’s aspect. He seemed to walk like a somnambulist through the saloons. He appeared to be wandering as in search of some one, and eventually he disappeared.