Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/31

 cause for anger." She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. "Besides," she added softly, "Love can be so many things. . . . Believe me, I know."

"Slowly's he pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say. . . . It is, after all, her affair."

The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.

It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman.