Already facing the door she turned her head for a whispered taunt: "Come!
Confess you were dying to see her stupid little face once more,"--to
which he disdained to answer.
Flora de Barral, still seated before the table at which she had been
wording on her sketch, raised her head at the noise of the opening door.
The invading manner of their entrance gave her the sense of something she
had never seen before. She knew them well. She knew the woman better
than she knew her father. There had been between them an intimacy of
relation as great as it can possibly be without the final closeness of
affection. The delightful Charley walked in, with his eyes fixed on the
back of her governess whose raised veil hid her forehead like a brown
band above the black line of the eyebrows. The girl was astounded and
alarmed by the altogether unknown expression in the woman's face. The
stress of passion often discloses an aspect of the personality completely
ignored till then by its closest intimates. There was something like an
emanation of evil from her eyes and from the face of the other, who,
exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a head, kept his eyelids
lowered in a sinister fashion--which in the poor girl, reached, stirred,
set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive terror lying locked up at
the bottom of all human hearts and of the hearts of animals as well.
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