It was utterly unlike the old laugh, harsh, with none of the old silver in it.
Aunt Abigail recalled her to the event at hand with a snort of disapproval.
"Sally!" One word, but sufficient!
And Captain Bluster, blind in more ways than one, though he heard the Huntington doubloons clinking loudly enough, patted her arm clumsily.
"Come, come, my lass, it'll soon be over." Ah, but there was the rub. Would it?
In the vestibule she paused to adjust her veil. Not heeding at all the ecstatic whispers of Stella Appleby, her maid-of-honour, she surveyed the pews, then, urged by some strange compulsion, turned, and at one of the rear windows saw the two faces staring in,—the woman's and the man's, the one angry and scornful, the other mocking—oh, yes, it was, it was mocking! She knew them for the two of the graveyard.
Now, the strange woman who in the flash of the lightning had seemed clad in a robe of blood, was herself in deadly fear of a medium's prophecy. It therefore seems incredible to credit her with occult powers. Those other eyes—of the man beside her—rather suggested these disturbing things, perhaps even deserving the term malevolent. But Carlotta was almost supernatural in her gift for clowning, uncanny in her power of placing another in an embarrassing position. She could have turned Elsa into a Vesta Tilley, the holy grail into a stein. In fact, it has been reported that once when she had gone to attend the funeral of some old Broad-
