Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/268

 other story. Surprising how well she knew the time and people.

She felt a freedom in moving amongst them, she was too self-conscious to have realized in a story of her own times. All her carefully nurtured niceties, all the 'ideals' that Miss Bigley had taught her—all was gone but the curiously grim stage that she had set herself and something alive and burning that she remembered from Anthony Jones. So completely did she come under the spell of this new art she did not leave the inn for five days, and ate and slept but little. She was dark about the eyes, her face white, drawn, and luminous. The kindly landlady was afraid she was ill. Miss Champion came in person. From her bedroom window Lanice indifferently watched a meagre, hatchet-faced old lady, who twitched her bonnet strings and ruffled her black silks as a turkey cock rustles his burnished feathers.

She never again found the sheep path through the furze, and she never again wrote a story of the Salem witches. For better or worse her four stories were written.

First was 'The Tale that is Told.' It had the precocious genius and weakness of a first-born. Next was 'The Salem Satyr,' pastoral almost, with the winds of spring snapping over the hills like whips, and maple leaves unfolding their tiny hands to you. Then 'The Whisperer' next, a weaker brother of 'The Tale that is Told,' a little saner, a little gentler, without either the faults or grandeur of the first story. Last was 'The Amber Witch,' and her poisonous power over men.