UPON A CARPET
when they entered he could not tell. They entered simultaneously, Ferrier with Rader from the veranda, Blanche through the inner door.
She came in with the air of conscious triumph of women when they feel they have succeeded, either with themselves or with those mysterious manipulations of things which they carry on beneath the surface of events. She wore a dress, charming, not for what it was, but for what it showed her to be. The soft flow of the old, washed stuff conformed graciously to the lines of her body, and the beauties he had glimpsed and guessed at before, the sloping line of the neck and shoulder, and the long, lovely forms of the arms were uncovered. These and the way she carried her head, the brightness of her eyes, the look she had of rejoicing at being alive, made her shine in her candle-lighted, fire-lighted room.
"Well, what's happened?" Rader wanted to know, blinking at the dance of shadows around him. "Hermionie, what have you done to us?"
"I haven't. It is Blanche's doing." Mrs. Rader looked down. Carron perceived that she understood the reason of her daughter's transformation scene, but the two men who had just come in evidently found it an astonishment.
"Very pretty," the scholar determined, looking at his daughter, patting her arm.
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