In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously—­to borrow a phrase from the Argus—­“by each and all who had the good fortune to be present,” for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times.  She was incontestably feminine.  She gave the woman-call.  That she seemed to give it against her wish,—­without intention,—­that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point.  Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit—­cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.

And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady—­with one negligible exception—­she seemed to try perversely not to be so.  She was amazingly gracious to it—­still with one exception.  She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth.  She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please.  She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless.  Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.

It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited.  If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.

The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis.  For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times.  This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.

Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family.  She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from “making a fool of himself.”  It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.

With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring.  It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat.  The dominant line of the composition I saw to be—­