After a pause, she moved over to her long glass and looked at herself. She was quite satisfied. There was nothing more to do, and she threw herself into an easy-chair, and called up that vision of him behind her closed lids as he entered her cordially hated home.
When the gong sounded she went down, and as they were all assembled in the dining-room, and she was the last to enter, all eyes turned upon her as she did so. She hesitated for a moment by the door, and Everest thought, with a sudden startled interest, what an attractive picture she made. Her soft, snow-white draperies fell about a figure tall and slender and supple, harmonious in all its lines as a beautiful melody is in its sounds. Three rows of glistening pearls encircled a round throat, whiter than themselves; above was her pink-tinted face, crowned by its fair clustering hair. But the arresting power was in her eyes; excited, pleased, animated, they were wide open, full of light and fire, and as he rose and approached her they gazed upon him with a sort of rapture.
Her two sisters glanced at her in angry surprise, and then at each other.
Her father got up and presented Everest blandly: "Regina, this is Mr. Everest Lanark. My youngest daughter, Regina."
Everest took a very soft, warm hand in his for a moment, and while he did so, the fragrance of the glorious tea-rose blossoms, one in her hair, another at her breast, came to him; his eyes fell on them, and always afterwards her image, in his mind, was associated with those golden roses.
A moment later they were all seated at the table: Everest on the right of Mrs. Marlow and next to Miss Marlow, and opposite Miss Violet Marlow and the Rector, Regina at the end of the table, on his side, where he could not well see her, except by bending forward.
She did not care. She was quite content. The dinner went admirably. Everest, pleased at the proximity of so much youthful beauty, and with a really clever if extremely narrow man, in the Rector opposite, to talk to, appeared quite to enjoy it. At its conclusion the four women rose; the men were left together.
Everest did not drink much, but he tried the Rector's old claret; he did not smoke either, but his host did, so Everest took a cigarette with him.
Regina slipped away up to her own room. She was afraid to risk being alone in the drawing-room with her sisters, lest her roses should be torn off, her hair pulled down or her toilette suffer in some way at their hands. Before the Rector they usually kept up some outward seemliness of conduct. So she waited until she heard Everest and her father come out of the dining-room and enter the drawing-room before she descended. She found Everest already seated between her two sisters, and she passed over to a far corner of the room to a low chair by the piano, and sat down there. She thought Everest would not be the man she felt sure he was if he could stand long the united conversational powers of Jane and Violet Marlow.