A DAUGHTER OF WITCHES.
A
Daughter of Witches
A ROMANCE
BY
JOANNA E. WOOD
AUTHOR OF
‘THE UNTEMPERED WIND,’ ‘JUDITH MOORE,’ ETC.
[Illustration]
W. J. GAGE & COMPANY
LIMITED
TORONTO
Entered according to Act of Parliament of Canada, in the office
of the Minister of Agriculture, by W. J. GAGE & CO. (Limited),
in the year one thousand nine hundred.
A DAUGHTER OF WITCHES.
CHAPTER I.
Miss Temperance Tribbey stood at the back door of the old Lansing house,
shading her eyes with one hand as she looked towards the gate to discover
why Grip, the chained-up mastiff, was barking so viciously.
The great wooden spoon, which she held in her other hand, was dripping
with red syrup, and showed that Temperance was preserving fruit. To the
eyes of the initiated there were other signs of her occupation. Notably
a dangerous expression in her eyes. The warmth of the stove was apt to
extend to Miss Tribbey’s temper at such times.
Sidney Martin, coming up the avenue-like lane to the farm-house, did not
observe Miss Tribbey standing at the back door, although she saw him;
and, therefore, much to his own future detriment and present prejudice in
Miss Tribbey’s eyes, he went to the front door, under its heavy pillared
porch, and knocked. After he had vanished round the corner of the house
towards the ill-chosen door, Miss Tribbey waited impatiently for the
knock, calculating whether she could safely leave her fruit on the fire
whilst she answered it.
The knock did not come. Muffled by the heavy door, its feeble echo was
absorbed by the big rooms between the front door and the kitchen.
“Well!” said Temperance, “has he gone to Heaven all alive, like fish goes
to market, or is he got a stroke?”
The cat arched its back against Miss Tribbey’s skirts and so shirked
the reply which clearly devolved upon it, there being no other living
creature visible in the big kitchen.
“It’s as bad as consumpting to have a man hanging over a body’s head like
this,” continued Temperance. “My palpitations is coming on! If I’m took
with them and that fruit on the fire, along of a man not knowing enough
to knock!”
The fruit in the big copper kettle began to rise insidiously towards the
brim.
“I’ll just go and take a speck at him through the shutters,” said she.
She crossed the kitchen, but ere she left it, long housewifely habit made
her “give a look to the stove.” The burnished copper kettle was domed by
a great crimson bubble, raised sphere-like by the steam.
“My soul!” said Temperance, and took a flight across the kitchen, lifting
the heavy pot with one sweep from the fire to the floor. The dome
quivered, rose a fraction and collapsed in a mass of rosy foam.
The crisis was past, and just then the expected knock came.
Temperance drew a long breath.
“There!” she said, “that jell’s done for! I’ll have to stand palavering
with some agent chap or book-canvasser with my jell a-setting there
gettin’ all muddied up.”
This reflection bore her company to the front door, which she opened with
an air of calm surprise. Miss Tribbey knew her manners.
“Well, I declare!” she said. “Have you been here long?”
“No—came this very minute,” said Sidney in his soft, penetrating voice.
“Oh, the liar!” said Miss Tribbey to herself, scandalized.
“It’s beautiful here,” he continued. “That field of yellow grain there is
worth a journey to see.”
(“Poor crittur,” Miss Tribbey said in relating this afterwards. “Poor,
ignorant crittur! Not knowing it’s a burning, heartsick shame to see
grain that premature ripe with the hay standing in win’rows in the field,
before his eyes.”)
“Ahem!” said Miss Tribbey, her visitor showing signs of relapsing again
into that reverie which had made the interval of waiting seem as nothing
to him, unconscious as he was of the narrowly averted tragedy with Miss
Tribbey’s fruit.
But face to face with her he was too sensitive not to recognize her
impatience with his dallying mood. He roused himself and turned towards
her with a frank and boyish smile.
“I’m bothering you,” he said, “and doubtless keeping you from something
important.”
“I’m making jell,” said she briefly, her attitude growing tense.
“Have you heard Mr. Lansing speak of Sidney Martin?” he asked. “In
reference to his coming to stay here this summer? I’m Sidney Martin, and
I want to come, if it is convenient to receive me, the beginning of next
week, and——”
“Come where?” demanded Temperance.
“Here,” said Sidney, a little embarrassed.
“To this house?”
“Yes,” said Sidney, looking at her with the confidence in his eyes of one
who, loving his fellow-creatures more than life, expects and anticipates
their love in return; one does not often see this expression, but one
often sees the residuum left after the ignorance it bespeaks has been
melled and mingled by experience.
“Mr. Lansing is over at the unction sale at Abiron Ranger’s,” said
Temperance. “You’ll excuse me, my jell’s a-waitin’ for me, and whatever
time other folks has to waste I’ve none! You’ll excuse me! I know
nothing about boarders and sich!”
“Boarders,” said Sidney in alarm, looking about for signs of the enemy.
“Do you take boarders?”
“It would seem so now,” said Temperance, cuttingly. “It would sertingly
seem so.”
“Oh, bless you!” said Sidney. “I’m not a boarder! I’m a visitor. There’s
a great difference, isn’t there? I’m the son of old Sidney Martin, the
county clerk who went away to Boston and married there. You have heard of
him, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have,” said Temperance, throwing one end of her apron over
her head to shield off the sun. “Yes, I have, though I was in short
petticoats and my hair in a pig-tail when it happened. He went to Bosting
and married rich, didn’t he?”
“He married in Boston,” said Sidney. “Where is Mr. Ranger’s?”
“Abiron Ranger lives two miles down the road, across to the right,”
said Temperance. “He died a week ago Wednesday, and there’s an unction
sale there to-day. There’s goin’ to be a divide up. The widow wants her
thirds. A very pushin’ woman Mis’ Ranger is.”
“Two miles more,” said Sidney, with something like a sigh.
Miss Tribbey’s keen eyes noted that he was white as from recent illness.
“Won’t you set down a spell and hev’ a glass of milk?” she asked; “set
down in the shade there, and I’ll get it in a jiffy. What’s the sense of
standing in a blazing sun like this?”
She whisked off and presently returned with the milk and a plate of New
England cookies.
“I’ve got to go back to my jell,” she said. “When you get ready to go
just put the things on the porch. My soul! I was took when you began
talking about boarders. For I’ve said, and said often, ‘If boarders
comes, I go.’ But visitors! We’ve always heaps of company, and I’ll go
bail no house I do for’ll ever be took short of things to put on the
table; the most unexpectedest company that ever drove up that avenue was
always set down to a liberal table; when you go down the road about a
mile, just look towards the right, and you’ll see a brown frame-house,
with a lightning-rod on it. That’s Abiron Ranger’s. Cut across the
fields. It’s shorter.”
“Thanks,” said Sidney; “what delicious milk.”
“Yes—Boss don’t give chalk and water, she don’t,” said Miss Tribbey, and
went off to her kitchen.
“A poor, slim jack of a man,” she soliloquised, ladling out her jelly.
“My soul! There’s a mighty difference between him and Lanty—but there—his
kind don’t grow on every bush. Clear Lansing he is, through and through,
and there never was no runts among the Lansings.”
For a few minutes Sidney rested in the porch, his eyes dwelling upon the
undulating grain before him. To one more experienced in these matters,
its burnished gold would have told sad tales of the terrible drouth which
had scorched the country side, but to him it appeared the very emblem of
peace and plenty.
What field of the cloth of gold was ever equal in splendour to this?
He rose and passed down the dusty road. Upon one hand the panicles of
an oat field whispered together, upon the other stretched the barren
distances of a field known far and near as Mullein Meadow, these weeds
and hard shiny goat grass being all that grew upon it.
Sidney did not grasp the significance of its picturesque grey boulders,
nor think how dear a possession it was at the price of the taxes upon it.
After Mullein Meadow came a little wood, thick with underbrush, in the
shadow of which a few brackens were yet green; and fronting the wood a
hayfield, with a patch of buckwheat in full bloom in one corner, showing
against the dim greenness of the hay like a fragrant white handkerchief
fallen from an angel’s hand.
Sidney cut across the hayfield to where a glistening point glimmered in
the sunshine, above a sloping roof set on brown walls.
“‘How curious. How real!’” he said to himself. “‘Underfoot the divine
soil—Overhead the sun.’”
He reached the enclosure in which the house stood, and paused at the gate
to watch the groups of men discussing their purchases, for the sale was
over.
Presently, his interest urging him, he entered, and mingled with the
others, having the fanciful idea he would know his father’s old friend
by intuition. His eyes softened as he looked at the weather-beaten faces
and hard-wrought hands of these men. The memory of the golden grain
was dimmed a little, and he saw bands of men bending above their toil
beneath stern skies, “storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and
oil.” But that vision was illy entertained in his sanguine, idealistic
imagination. It was dismissed to give place once more to the “free
farmer” of song and story, and as if to bear witness to this latter
picture, a young man detached himself somewhat impatiently from a group
of his fellows, and advancing towards where Sidney stood, flung himself
across a mettlesome roan which was tugging viciously at its bridle as it
stood tied beneath a tree.
The young man’s face was flushed, he was blue-eyed and debonair, his
yellow hair tossed back carelessly above his brow; a wide, flapping felt
hat rested on the back of his head. His features were large and strongly
carved. His mouth, seen red through his tow-coloured moustache, had all
the sweetness of a woman’s and much of the deviltry of a rake’s. But his
face did not look vicious, only dangerous. His strong, lean hand curbed
his horse easily; he turned in his saddle to call to those whom he had
just left.
“If anyone wants a last word he knows where to find me,” he cried.
“Yes,” someone said, giving a coarse laugh; “near some pair of apron
strings.”
“What did you say?” demanded Lanty Lansing, urging his horse near the
group.
“Nothing; O, nothing, Lanty,” said the speaker irritatingly, whilst
Lanty’s horse circled the group crab-fashion.
“Don’t let me keep you,” went on the man, and Sidney saw he was heavy,
black-browed and strongly built. “Don’t let me keep you. Is it the little
yellow-haired one or the other? I like the little one best myself, Miss——”
“Keep my cousins’ names out of your mouth,” said Lanty, his quick temper
in a flame, “or I’ll break your neck for you.”
“If all’s true that’s told for true, you’re better at breaking hearts
than necks. There’s a little girl over Newton way—but there! I’ll tell
no tales; but to say you’re going to have both your cousins! You’re a
Mormon, Lanty, that’s what you are.”
“Be quiet! Be quiet!” some of the men said. “Good-bye, Lanty, better be
off; he don’t mean nothing.”
But the big man, sure of the prestige of his size, thinking, evidently,
that Lanty would not dismount, was not to be silenced. Perhaps he was
hardly quite sober. He was a machine agent in the neighbourhood, and had
bidden unsuccessfully against Lanty for a horse. His next words took him
too far.
“I ain’t sayin’ anything to put his back up! All I say is that them
cousins of his can smile at other folks as well as at him, and why
shouldn’t they? I don’t like a girl no less because she——” He never
finished.
Lanty was off his horse like a flash. His fist caught the big man under
the jaw, lifting him almost off his feet and sending him crashing down.
Lanty waited with hands clenched for him to rise. The crowd swayed, those
close at hand giving way, those upon the outskirts pressing forward. The
horse, so suddenly released, reared and swung round on its hind legs,
and just then Sidney saw a tall, finely-formed young woman appear almost
under the plunging horse, twist a strong hand in the bridle, and wring
both curb and snaffle so viciously that the beast gave his head to her
guidance. She wheeled it towards Lanty.
“Lanty,” she said, laying her free hand upon his arm; “Lanty.”
“Go into the house, Vashti,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“You are not going to fight,” she said, “_with him_?”
Lansing was silent; she continued: “Go home, Lanty, please——”
Some of the older men had closed around the man, who was just rising to
his feet. The first mad impetus of battle was cooling in Lansing’s veins,
and just then another girl pushed through the group of men to his side. A
slight, graceful creature, with the Lansing blue eyes and fair skin, and
sweet lips, she was trembling—white.
“Lanty,” she said, with terror in her eyes, “has he hurt you? You
frighten me horribly.”
His eyes rested upon her, self-reproach making them eloquent.
He took the reins from the tall girl’s hand, looking always at the white,
appealing face of the other.
“I’m a bit of a fool,” he said; “but he spoke of you two and——” he
paused; “I’ll be over to-night,” he said, and rode away.
Vashti Lansing’s hand and wrist were wrenched, and already beginning to
swell; the rearing horse had not been so easily subdued after all; but
physical pain was a slight thing to her just then.
“Come,” she said to her cousin. “There’s father coming out. Don’t tell
him; let some one else. There are always plenty ready to talk.”
So the two girls went into the house, and Sidney Martin stood gazing
after them, rapt in the vision of a magnificently made woman curbing
and subduing a rearing horse. Surely a type of the eternal divinity of
womanhood, striving against the evil that men do.
Sidney Martin, dreamer of dreams, cherisher of ideals, delicate and
supra-sensitive, was subjugated for ever by love of that splendid piece
of vitality—that woman whom even at this moment he likened to the _Venus
de Milo_—whose magnificent energy and forceful grace recalled so vividly
the _Winged Victory of Samothrace_. With a throb he remembered the beauty
of that headless masterpiece, where it stands in the cool greyness of
the Louvre, the inexplicable sense of triumphant effort expressed in its
heroic pose. How many aspiring souls have gathered fresh courage from its
mutilated majesty, where it stands at the head of the wide stairs! And
here in the New England hills he had found a woman who might have been
its original. The great sculptors had not dreamed then, when they created
these Goddesses of stone; even unto this day, it seemed, they walked the
earth, radiant in strength and beauty. How fitting that their statues
should be given wings, to typify the splendid spirit prisoned in the
imperial clay!
Sidney watched the girls enter the house and followed them involuntarily.
As he passed the bully who had been knocked down, he saw there was a lump
like an egg already adorning his jaw.
“Serves him right!” said gentle Sidney Martin to himself.
A little farther on half-a-dozen men stood talking together; one, whom
Sidney took to be the auctioneer, was saying meaningly:—
“It’s a bad business bidding for what you don’t want.”
“Yes,” said one of the group, laboriously keeping up the joke. “Yes—for
it’s apt to be knocked down to you, and then you’ve got it on your hands.”
“On your jaw, you mean,” said the auctioneer smartly; whereat a laugh
went up. Clearly Lanty Lansing had partizans here.
As Sidney reached the doorway within which the girls had vanished, a
grey-haired man stepped forth from it.
“Mr. Lansing?” said Sidney, confidently.
His intuitions had not played him false.
“I am Sidney Martin,” he continued, but got no further with his
self-introduction.
“I’m right glad to see you,” said old Lansing heartily, “right glad to
see you! So you’re old Sid’s son? Well, you don’t favour him no more than
my girl favours me! I was struck all of a heap when Dr. Clement told me
he knew old Sid’s son in Bosting; says I, ‘If that younker is like his
father I should say he’d have a liking for the fields, even if he is
Bosting born and bred.’ But there! How did you come? Is your things at
the station? How long is it since old Sid died? A nice old boy was Sid!
And he had a talent for finding wood-chucks that beat the dickens.”
“I lost my father four years ago,” said Sidney—“he often spoke of you.”
“I’ll warrant he did,” said old Lansing, “and my girls know old Sid as
well as their next door neighbour. Sid weren’t one of the sort to go back
on old times—girls”—raising his voice—“girls!”
The two girls reappeared side by side.
“This is Mr. Martin,” said the old man; “Old Sid Martin’s son.”
The girls gave him characteristic salutations. Vashti’s inclination was
stately, with all the plastic grace of her beautiful form expressed in
it. Mabella, to whose cheeks the soft rose had returned, bestowed upon
him the tantalizing salutation of the born coquette, piquant, confident,
but withal reserved.
“My daughter Vashti,” continued Mr. Lansing. “My niece Mabella”—and
then—“Where’s Lanty?”
“He has gone home,” said Vashti; her voice was soft and full; a rarity in
that region, and a heritage from the Lansings of old.
“That’s too bad! It’s my nephew—Lansing Lansing,” he went on to Sidney,
“the last of the Lansings.”
“He’s coming over to-night,” said Mabella.
“You’ll see him then; there are only four Lansings left now. An old man,
a young one, and two girls. Well, it’s a good old stock and that’s plenty
for a fresh graft. Well, well! How’s Miss’ Ranger feeling, girls? Are you
ready to go home?”
“Yes—quite. She’s more cheerful,” said Vashti. “Shall we get ready?”
“Yes.” Then turning to Sidney: “Where did you say your things were?”
Sidney had no time for explanations up to this moment.
“I’ve been staying at Brixton,” he said; “and this afternoon I thought I
would come over and ask when I might come, as you had been so good as to
invite me; so I came by train from Brixton, and walked to Lansing Farm,
and there I saw a lady who directed me here.”
“Temperance,” said the two girls, and looked at each other.
“She gave me some delightful milk and her opinion of boarders,” said
Sidney, smiling.
Mabella’s laugh rang out like the call of a bird.
“Go and get ready, girls,” said Mr. Lansing, “and I’ll fetch the horses
around.”
The girls went indoors, first telling Sidney they would not be long. He
went to the side of an old well and sat down upon the edge, looking into
its cool depths; far, far down, he could see the distorted vision of his
own face. A fat toad hopped lazily about the stones in the moist coolness
of the well mouth. The wooden handle of the windlass was worn by many
palms—as the creeds of the world are fretted and attenuated by the very
eagerness of those who seek the Living Waters by their aid. Hop-vines
grew over the house and Phœbe birds fluttered through their rustling
leaves. The men stared curiously at the stranger by the well, to whom
presently came the two girls again, in flat, wide hats.
“How brave you are!” he said to Vashti, rising at their approach. He was
more than ordinarily tall, but Vashti’s stately head was well above his
shoulder.
“How brave you are! That beast of a horse looked frightful as it stood
rearing above you! I thought you would be killed.”
“I am not afraid of many things,” said Vashti, soberly. Yet there was
that leaping within her breast which sometimes frightened her sorely.
Sidney’s eyes dilated with eagerness as he drank in the suave beauty
of her statuesque shape. It was a beauty which appealed to him keenly.
Divorced from all minor attributes, it depended securely upon form and
line alone; colour, environment, counted as nothing in its harmonious
whole. But one of the flexile wrists was swollen and stiff.
“You are hurt,” he cried, forgetting that to keen eyes his anxiety might
seem absurd. “You are hurt! That horse!”
She coloured a little—slowly—it was like the reflection of a rosy cloud
on marble.
“Yes, it is twisted, I think.”
He looked at it and shuddered. It gave him a sense of absolute physical
nausea to see suffering. He had had a strange bringing-up by a visionary
mother, who, absorbed in a vision of the Pain of the world, had impressed
her morbid ideas upon her child, until now, in manhood, he was as
sensitive to even the abstract idea of pain as the eye is to dust. Before
real suffering his whole being shrank. At that moment Mr. Lansing drove
up in the democrat waggon; but a change which was very apparent had come
over his countenance.
Vashti and Mabella looked at each other and nodded apprehensively.
“Get in, girls,” said the old man in abrupt, authoritative tones. “Come
up beside me here,” he said to Sidney.
They drove through the yard in silence, old Lansing nodding good-bye
curtly to his neighbours. The moment they were on the road he turned to
the two girls:
“What’s this I hear?” he demanded. “Lanty has been fighting again! Verily
‘he that slayeth with the sword shall perish by the sword.’ It’s a
scandal.”
“It wasn’t a sword; ’twas his fist,” said Mabella _sotto voce_.
“He only knocked the man down,” said Vashti, “and he needed it.”
“You’re a judge of such things, evidently,” said her father irately. “I
say it’s a disgrace to be a common brawler—to——”
Mabella spoke up eagerly. “Oh, but uncle,” she said. “The man said
something about Vashti and me—I don’t know what, but not pleasant, and——”
“He did, did he?” demanded the old man, his face growing strangely like
Lanty’s in its anger. “He _did_. Wait till I see him! I’ll break every
bone in his body if I catch him”; he cut the horses viciously with his
whip. “Only wait.” Evidently he had forgotten his doctrine of peace. As a
sky is lighted by an after-glow into the beauty of dawn, so old Lansing’s
face illumined by his wrath was youthful once more.
“He spoke slightingly of you, did he! The——”
He choked down an unscriptural epithet.
Mabella nudged Vashti gleefully. Sidney managed to give the girls a
look of sympathetic congratulation over his shoulder. But Vashti’s
face was still sombre. She knew her father far too well to think he
would be consistently inconsistent. Lanty would have his bad half-hour,
irrespective of this raging. The Lansings were essentially illogical. It
was a common saying in the neighbourhood, that calculating upon a Lansing
was like catching a flea: when you thought you had him he wasn’t there!
“What did you think when Dr. Clement gave you my invitation?” asked old
Lansing.
“I was simply delighted,” said Sidney; “you know I did not feel that I
would be coming among strangers. My dear old dad spoke very often of the
Lansings, and you in particular.”
“Yes—he wanted sister Mabella, her mother there; we quarrelled, sister
and me, over that matter. She would have her cousin Reuben and nobody
else. Poor things! Neither the one nor the other of ’em lived long. We
Lansings are great on marrying cousins,” he said half apologetically,
suddenly remembering it was this young man’s father who had been slighted.
Both the girls blushed, but the blush died unseen upon the cheeks of
each. For neither searched the countenance of the other. How blindly we
stumble towards our own desires—unheeding the others who seek the same
treasure till a hand plucks it away from before us, and then with empty
hands we brush the mists from our eyes, and see how, led by fatuous
delusion through perilous places, we have come to the ashes! But the
ashes are never so dead that eager breath may not blow them into that
Phoenix flame whence Hope is born.
“My father told me all the old stories of his boyhood,” said Sidney. “I
have heard of all your adventures together.”
“So have we,” said Mabella. “Do you know the story of how a streamer of
crape was tied upon the door of the old church the night the Independents
opened theirs?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Sidney, laughing. “My father related that exploit of
Mr. Lansing’s many a time.”
Both girls laughed aloud, at least Mabella did, and Vashti’s full, soft
laughter echoed through it like the call of a wood dove.
“My uncle,” said Mabella, with emphasis, “has told us how your father did
it.”
“Tut—tut,” said old Lansing, not ill pleased. “Not worth
repeating—school-boy capers.”
Afterwards in comparing notes the girls and Sidney found that in every
instance the teller of the story had given the other the hero’s rôle
to play. A generous thing, surely. Yet, like all true generosity, not
barren. For in the imaginations of all these young people, this Damon
and Pythias of the New England hills shared a dual glory for deeds of
“derring do” against scholastic authority and ghostly reverence; and
their names went down to posterity as mighty hunters of the woodchuck.
“Must you really go back to Brixton to-night?” asked Vashti of Sidney,
as they alighted from the democrat waggon. The man trembled as he looked
upon her, so strongly had her individuality impressed him.
“Yes,” he said. “I must go back to-night, but,” he added, not concealing
his eagerness, “I shall return.”
“Whenever you can, and the sooner the better,” said old Lansing,
interrupting him.
“Monday, then,” said Sidney.
“Monday be it,” replied the old man, pleased with his eagerness. “You
want to get browned up a bit,” he added. “Have you been ill?”
“Grippe—in the winter,” Sidney Martin said, suddenly feeling ashamed of
acknowledging it—before that splendid creature whose presence seemed such
a reproach to all less superbly well than herself. It was a bad sign,
had Sidney been looking for such subtleties, that Vashti’s magnificence
of physique impressed him as a reproach against imperfection, rather
than as a triumph of the race. It was so with her always. She gave
others a chilling sense of what the human “might have been” rather than
an inspiring perception of what the human “might be.” Surely the spirit
is subtly strong, giving each individual an _aura_ of his own which may
stimulate those who enter it like the piney ozone of the mountains, or
stifle them as does the miasmic breath of a morass.
“Well—if you must really go——” said Mabella.
Supper was over—a supper presided over by Temperance Tribbey, and
justifying thoroughly her remarks upon her capability as a purveyor.
Sidney was taking leave at the front door preparatory to his departure
for the station.
“Yes—don’t keep him any longer, girls. He’ll miss his train. It is
sun-down now; another dry sun-down at that! It’s killing weather. Well,
good bye—we’ll look for you Monday.”
“Yes, on Monday,” said Mabella’s treble.
“On Monday,” echoed Vashti’s contralto.
“On Monday,” repeated Sidney, raising his hat and turning away, and the
voices of the three blent even as their lives were to do.
At the gate Sidney turned; Mabella had vanished promptly to adorn herself
against the arrival of Lanty. The old man had gone off to the stables.
Vashti stood alone, her figure erect beside the Corinthian pillar of
the old colonial porch. The rigid line of the column accentuated the
melting curves of shoulder and hip. Lighted by the yellow after-glow she
seemed transfigured to his glamoured fancy. He bared his head, and the
goddess raised her hand in farewell. He passed down the road in a dream,
hardly noting Lanty, as he rode past him to where Vashti waited in the
after-glow.