life.
Never before had the spirit and the flesh united in the appeal of a
woman to his imagination. Never before had the divine virgin of his
dreams assumed the living red and white of young girlhood. He thought
how soft her hair must be to the touch, and how warm her mouth would
glow from his kisses. With a kind of wonder he realized that this was
first love--that it was first love he had felt when he met her eyes
under the dappled sunlight in High Street. The memory of her beauty was
like a net which enmeshed his thoughts when he tried to escape it. Look
where he would he saw always a cloud of dark hair and two deep blue eyes
that shone as softly as wild hyacinths after a shower. Think as he would
he met always the haunting doubt--"What did she mean? Can it be true
that she already loves me?" So small an incident as Miss Priscilla's
Sunday call had not only upset his work for the morning, but had changed
in an instant the even course of his future. He decided suddenly that he
must see Virginia again--that he would go to Abby Goode's party, and
though the party was only three days off, it seemed to him that the
waiting would be almost unbearable. Only after he had once seen her
would it be possible, he felt, to stop thinking of her and to return
comfortably to his work.

CHAPTER VIII

WHITE MAGIC

In the centre of her bedroom, with her back turned to that bookcase
which was filled with sugared false-hoods about life, Virginia was
standing very straight while Miss Willy Whitlow knelt at her feet and
sewed pale blue bows on her overskirt of white organdie. Occasionally,
the door opened softly, and the rector or one of the servants looked in
to see "Jinny" or "Miss Jinny dressed for the party," and when such
interruptions occurred, Mrs. Pendleton, who sat on an ottoman at the
dressmaker's right hand and held a spool of thread and a pair of
scissors in her lap, would say sternly, "Don't move, Jinny, stand
straight or Miss Willy won't get the bows right." At these warning
words, Virginia's thin shoulders would spring back and the filmy ruffles
stir gently over her girlish breast.

Through the open window, beyond the drooping boughs of the paulownia
trees, a few wistful stars shone softly through the web of purple
twilight. The night smelt of a thousand flowers--all the mingled
sweetness of old gardens floated in on the warm wind and caressed the
faded figure of Miss Willy as lovingly as it did the young and ra