Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/28

 he got too heavy. He's been with us ten years. He's good and reliable and sometimes very funny. Old Mr. Pentland depends on him for everything. . . . Only he has a way of getting into scrapes with the girls from the village. He seems irresistible to them. . . and he's an immoral scamp."

Sabine's face lighted up suddenly, as if she had made a great discovery. "I thought so," she observed, and wandered away abruptly to continue the business of "absorbing" the ball.

She had asked about Higgins because the man was stuck there in her brain, set in the midst of a strange, confused impression that disturbed a mind usually marked by precision and clarity. She did not understand why it was that he remained the most vivid of all the kaleidoscopic procession of the ball. He had been an outsider, a servant, looking in upon it, and yet there he was—a man whom she had never noticed before—vivid and clear-cut, dominating the whole evening.

It had happened a little earlier when, standing in the windowed alcove of the old red-paneled writing-room, she had turned her back for a moment on the ball, to look out upon the distant marshes and the sea, across meadows where every stone and tree and hedge was thrown into a brilliant relief by the clarity of the moonlight and the thin New England air. And trapped suddenly by the still and breathless beauty of the meadows and marshes and distant white dunes, lost in memories more than twenty years old, she had found herself thinking: "It was always like this . . . rather beautiful and hard and cold and a little barren, only I never saw it before. It's only now, when I've come back after twenty years, that I see my own country exactly as it is."

And then, standing there quite alone, she had become aware slowly that she was being watched by some one. There was a sudden movement among the lilacs that stood a little way off wrapped in thick black shadows. . . the faintest stirring