The Argosy — page 104: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The White Witch. gI heard that Mrs. Mayne had offered to chaperonthem. He liked Mrs. Mayne, but was shrewd enough not quite to trust her. Besides, he did not much care for his daughters to appear in public without their mother ; and although he had, of course, only heard an edition revised for family use of Elspeth’s visit to the Abbey, he did not want Godfrey, of whose indolent, useless, though harmless habits he disapproved, to come more in contact with the two girls than was necessary. Elspeth was in a flutter of delight. Since the excitement of the evening before, of that sweet taste of admiration when she was “‘dressed- up ”—an incident which had not reached the Vicar’s ears, of that more dangerous sensation when, in the garden, Godfrey’s hands had touched her hair, and she had heard, for the first time, a young man’s voice shaking a little as it addressed her, she had been restless, discontented, petulant, feverishly unable to settle to anything. Her eyes turned in the direction of the Abbey, whose red gables one could see between the trees of the Vicarage garden, a hundred times in the course of the morning. As for Godfrey, he was naturally a prey to no such violent excitement ; nevertheless, he, too, looked forward with some sort of languid interest to another meeting with the girl who had fascinated him for an hour the night before. So that when the landau, containing himself and his step-mother, drove up to the Vicarage, and the girls, in ambitious new gowns made at home and bearing too evident traces of the influence of a fashion-book, came out, radiant with excitement, he decided that Elspeth’s face was certainly calculated to bear even daylight inspection. In the tent, appropriated to the show, they all kept well together, and inspected the flowers in slow, deliberate fashion. Then the band began to play in a large marquee, and then it was that Mrs. Mayne committed an act which justified the Vicar’s objections to her chaperonage. In the marquee they met some cousins of the Thornhills, and Mrs. Mayne encouraged Matilda to join their party for a time; then she took a seat to listen to the music, and told Godfrey and Elspeth to walk about and look at what they liked, and they would find her in the same spot on their return. No sooner had they availed them- selves of this permission than Mrs. Mayne, glancing around, saw the eyes of that same young woman in black gazing at her under cover of some intervening foliage. _ Jane Wilding was seated by her cousin, Mrs, Caird. Caird, the florist, was one of the largest of the exhibitors, and could command the entrance of his wife and a friend or two to the show. Suddenly, Mrs. Caird also espied Mrs. Mayne. “Look, Jane,” she said, ‘yonder is the new lady at the Abbey. See! the one in the white bonnet and veil. Mr. Mayne met her somewhere abroad and married her off-hand, it’s said. She was a Mrs. Dixon. But I expect you have heard all about it at home.” CORNICE OOOKS (E@) m