A cruel, dangerous mood came over her. It enveloped her soul in its sombre hues and the steel of it struck deep.
She scarcely remembered her dead mother--only her eyes. But when these moods came upon Helen Conway--and her life had been one wherein they had fallen often--the memory of her mother's eyes came to her and stood out in the air before her, and they were sombre and sad, and full, too, of the bitterness of hopes unfulfilled.
All her life she had fought these moods when they came. But now--now she yielded to the subtle charm of them--the wild pleasure of their very sinfulness.
"And why not," she cried to herself when the consciousness of it came over her, and like a morphine fiend carrying the drug to his lips, she knew that she also was pressing there the solace of her misery.
"Why should I not dissipate in the misery of it, since so much of it has fallen upon me at once?
"Mother?--I never knew one--only the eyes of one, and they were the eyes of Sorrow. Father?"--she waved her hand toward the old home--"drunk-wrecked--he would sell me for a quart of whiskey.
"Then I loved--loved an image which is--mud--mud"--she fairly spat it out. "One poor friend I had--I scorned him, and he has forgotten me, too. But I did know that I had social standing--that my name was an honored one until--now."
"Now!"--she gulped it down. "Now I am a common mill girl."
She had been walking rapidly down the road toward the house. So rapidly that she did not know how flushed and beautiful she had become. She was swinging her hat impatiently in her hand, her fine hair half falling and loose behind, shadowing her face as rosy sunset clouds the temple on Mt. Ida. A face of more classic beauty, a skin of more exquisite fairness, flushed with the bloom of youth, Richard Travis had never before seen.
And so, long before she reached him, he reined in his trotters and sat silently watching her come. What a graceful step she had--what a neck and head and hair--half bent over with eyes on the ground, unconscious of the beauty and grace of their own loveliness.
She almost ran into his buggy--she stopped with a little start of surprise, only to look into his clean-cut face, smiling half patronizingly, half humorously, and with a look of command too, and of patronage withal, of half-gallant heart-undoing.