but still Mr. Dudley Venner, after a few courteous words, came back to the blue eyes and brown hair; still he kept his look fixed upon her, and his tones grew sweeter and lower as he became more interested in talk, until this poor, dear Helen, what with surprise, and the bashfulness natural to one who had seen little of the gay world, and the stirring of deep, confused sympathies with this suffering father, whose heart seemed so full of kindness, felt her cheeks glowing with unwonted flame, and betrayed the pleasing trouble of her situation by looking so sweetly as to arrest Mr. Bernard’s eye for a moment, when he looked away from the young beauty sitting next him.

Elsie meantime had been silent, with that singular, still, watchful look which those who knew her well had learned to fear.  Her head just a little inclined on one side, perfectly motionless for whole minutes, her eyes seeming to grow small and bright, as always when she was under her evil influence, she was looking obliquely at the young girl on the other side of her cousin Dick and next to Bernard Langdon.  As for Dick himself, she seemed to be paying very little attention to him.  Sometimes her eyes would wander off to Mr. Bernard, and their expression, as old Dr. Kittredge, who watched her for a while pretty keenly, noticed, would change perceptibly.  One would have said that she looked with a kind of dull hatred at the girl, but with a half-relenting reproachful anger at Mr. Bernard.

Miss Letty Forester, at whom Elsie had been looking from time to time in this fixed way, was conscious meanwhile of some unusual influence.  First it was a feeling of constraint,—­then, as it were, a diminished power over the muscles, as if an invisible elastic cobweb were spinning round her,—­then a tendency to turn away from Mr. Bernard, who was making himself very agreeable, and look straight into those eyes which would not leave her, and which seemed to be drawing her towards them, while at the same time they chilled the blood in all her veins.

Mr. Bernard saw this influence coming over her.  All at once he noticed that she sighed, and that some little points of moisture began to glisten on her forehead.  But she did not grow pale perceptibly; she had no involuntary or hysteric movements; she still listened to him and smiled naturally enough.  Perhaps she was only nervous at being stared at.  At any rate, she was coming under some unpleasant and unnatural influence or other, and Mr. Bernard had seen enough of the strange impression Elsie sometimes produced to wish this young girl to be relieved from it, whatever it was.  He turned toward Elsie and looked at her in such a way as to draw her eyes upon him.  Then he looked steadily and calmly into them.  It was a great effort, for some perfectly inexplicable reason.  At one instant he thought he could not sit where he was; he must go and speak to Elsie.  Then he wanted to take his eyes away from hers; there was something intolerable in the light