that came from them.  But he was determined to look her down, and he believed he could do it, for he had seen her countenance change more than once when he had caught her gaze steadily fixed on him.  All this took not minutes, but seconds.  Presently she changed color slightly,—­lifted her head, which was inclined a little to one side,—­shut and opened her eyes two or three times, as if they had been pained or wearied,—­and turned away baffled, and shamed, as it would seem, and shorn for the time of her singular and formidable or at least evil-natured power of swaying the impulses of those around her.

It takes too long to describe these scenes where a good deal of life is concentrated into a few silent seconds.  Mr. Richard Venner had sat quietly through it all, although this short pantomime had taken place literally before his face.  He saw what was going on well enough, and understood it all perfectly well.  Of course the schoolmaster had been trying to make Elsie jealous, and had succeeded.  The little school-girl was a decoy-duck,—­that was all.  Estates like the Dudley property were not to be had every day, and no doubt the Yankee usher was willing to take some pains to make sure of Elsie.  Doesn’t Elsie look savage?  Dick involuntarily moved his chair a little away from her, and thought he felt a pricking in the small white scars on his wrist.  A dare-devil fellow, but somehow or other this girl had taken strange hold of his imagination, and he often swore to himself, that, when he married her, he would carry a loaded revolver with him to his bridal chamber.

Mrs. Blanche Creamer raged inwardly at first to find herself between the two old gentlemen of the party.  It very soon gave her great comfort, however, to see that Marilla Rowens had just missed it in her calculations, and she chuckled immensely to find Dudley Venner devoting himself chiefly to Helen Darley.  If the Rowens woman should hook Dudley, she felt as if she should gnaw all her nails off for spite.  To think of seeing her barouching about Rockland behind a pair of long-tailed bays and a coachman with a band on his hat, while she, Blanche Creamer, was driving herself about in a one-horse “carriage”!  Recovering her spirits by degrees, she began playing her surfaces off at the two old Doctors, just by way of practice.  First she heaved up a glaring white shoulder, the right one, so that the Reverend Doctor should be stunned by it, if such a thing might be.  The Reverend Doctor was human, as the Apostle was not ashamed to confess himself.  Half-devoutly and half-mischievously he repeated inwardly, “Resist the Devil and he will flee from you.”  As the Reverend Doctor did not show any lively susceptibility, she thought she would try the left shoulder on old Dr. Kittredge.  That worthy and experienced student of science was not at all displeased with the manoeuvre, and lifted his head so as to command the exhibition through his glasses.  “Blanche is good for half a dozen years or so, if she is careful,” the Doctor said to himself, “and then she must take to her prayer-book.”  After this spasmodic failure of Mrs. Blanche Creamer’s to stir up the old Doctors, she returned again to the pleasing task of watching the Widow in her evident discomfiture.  But dark as the Widow looked in her half-concealed pet, she was but as a pale shadow, compared to Elsie in her silent concentration of shame and anger.