Her large dark eyes, veiled by unusually long lashes, looked sharply at you and then quickly turned away, with that air of mystery and secrecy, and love of secrets at all costs--even mock secrets--peculiar to the young virgin of all climes. Occasionally in glancing away they would half close in a thoughtful smile, which, to the uninitiated, unaware of the irrepressible spirits of their owner, was as unaccountable as it was provoking.

There was an air of childhood still clinging, as if from habit alone, to the outward insignia of maturity, in this mercurial, magnetic, and undaunted young person; and in her malicious elfish eyes could be read the solemn determination to force every possible claim that her double advantage, as child and adult, could, according to the occasion, uphold.

Her thick dark hair did not hang down her back in the rich spiral curl which is now becoming so common among schoolgirls; for that it was too plentiful, too troublesomely luxuriant. It hung like heavy bronze in a thick stiff plait--a badge both of her robust youth and the redundant richness of her blood,--and at its extremity it was tied with a broad ribbon of black silk. Beneath her hat, bold festoons of hair reached down almost to her eyebrows, and to these portions of her coiffure she constantly applied her soft shapely sun-tanned fingers, as if to reassure herself that they were keeping their proper position.

The roguish expression of her face was partly due to pure health and partly to wanton spirits, and her features possessed that exceptional animation which, even in the simple process of eating a fondant, produced the impression of extreme mobility.

Having long previously examined her fellow-passengers and judged them uninteresting, she divided her attention between the fleeting landscape at her side, a box of fruit creams, which she was consuming with grave perseverance, and the contents of a pocket-portfolio, which she appeared to be slowly sorting and weeding out. To everything she did, however, to each one of her movements, she had the air of imparting so much mysteriousness, so much elaborate secrecy, that she soon found herself the object of the united attention of all her companions. And occasionally when her fresh full lips parted in a smile at the things she read, the old gentleman opposite her had to turn also to the fleeting landscape as a prophylactic against the infection of her high spirits.

She gave the impression of that aggressive vitality with which Nature seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude immediately. A quivering freshness--the "bloom" of the poets--gave a soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders, and well developed.

Leonetta, as we have already seen, knew that she was attractive; but she did not know this fact as surely and unmistakably as--say, a philosopher looking at her did. She probably knew that she was sunburnt, for instance; but she was not aware of the depth which the dark natural virginal pigmentation of her neck, eyes, and knuckles, lent to the warm tanning of her skin. She did not know how prone the philosopher is to associate the combination of these two rich colourings with the wicked, dusky denizens of a tropical jungle--those creatures whose blood he suspects of being something deeper than red, who really look as if they were made from the earth and were going back to it, and who have nothing of that translucent pallor suggestive of heaven-sent and heaven-destined attributes.

She probably knew her dark eyes were fine and that their lashes were long; but she would have been surprised and perhaps even a little hurt if she had been told that their most striking feature was that, to every man, modest and shrewd enough to divine all that they could exact, they were terrifying. She knew her teeth were faultless; but she did not even suspect the thrill of pained joy that went through the philosopher's frame when he saw the life-hunger they revealed, and, what was more, the full deep bite and fast hold they would take of Life's entrails. A young girl's canines are self-revelatory in this respect. Let them be big and prominent, as Leonetta's were, and the fastness of her hold on Life, once she has bitten, promises to break all records. The sensitive philosopher has little patience with your fair delicate misses with small mouse-like canines. There are too many of them to begin with, and they are so instinctively ladylike.

Perhaps the most amusing thing in this world is to watch the antics of a large-canined virgin _de bonne famille_ who is trying to be a lady,--by "lady" is here meant someone who, among other parlour tricks, can perform the feat of "controlling" her feelings,--who has, that is to say, on the one hand "control" and on the other hand "feelings," and whose feelings are weaker than her control.

Leonetta's highly pigmented and sunburnt fingers suddenly ceased their twofold activity with the box of fondants and the pocket-portfolio of secret papers, and held a letter long and steadily before her eyes.

Again the old gentleman opposite turned to the landscape of fields on his right, and his loose lips worked ominously. The fixity of those keen eyes with their tell-tale slight inward squint, as she studied the letter, proved too much for him, particularly when she began to smile; and his glance wandered desperately to the country he was traversing, in the cool, pallid British greenness of which he found relief.

Evidently the letter was a piece of life, for Leonetta was now in deadly earnest, pinching her beautiful tawny neck thoughtfully here and there with her free hand, as she read, and breathing deeply. Her glance travelled rapidly, too, over certain passages, and would then stop dead, sometimes in order to allow a smile to dawn, sometimes to wander a moment to frown at the country-side. Evidently certain portions of the letter were quite uninteresting, or else she knew them by heart.

The letter she read was as follows:

"My own dearest Leo,

"Oh, how I miss you already! But I shan't be the _only_ one!

That's _some_ comfort. Think of church now without your dreadful remarks about all the still more dreadful people. I know one or two who are not going to church any more now.

Don't you feel ashamed of yourself? Don't you ever feel ashamed of yourself? And the river on Wednesdays, and the _park_ on Saturday afternoons! The place will be dead. It will be a vast waste. You told me to make up to Dorothy Garforth. But she's not _you_. She'll never have the pluck to talk to strange young men about their motor bikes or their horses and things. You _were_ a wonder! Still my own dear Leo, you promised to invite me up to London to meet your people, didn't you, and don't you dare to forget. I shall pine away here if you do.

"I must tell you something that happened last night. Well, I met Charlie as I was coming home from saying good-bye to you. He was desolate. You really have been a little cruel.

He said you gave him back his match-box and gold pencil, and that that meant you did not want anything more to do with him. He said he had been waiting behind the usual shrubbery in the park for two hours, for a long last good-bye and that you never turned up. I know what you mean about him, that he isn't smart and clean and all that, but he is rather nice all the same. Almost the best we knew. I think the hair on his hands, as you pointed out, made up for a heap of other shortcomings in him. But I know what you mean. He's a little rough and there's an end of it. I thought of telling him to write to you; but then it struck me you would not like him to. He said you were a flirt, and that you would only have a rich man. I said it wasn't that a bit, that he had quite misunderstood you. I couldn't tell him the truth, could I?--that he wasn't altogether '_toothsome_,' as you call it.

He said he had seen us talking to that motor-cyclist fellow in the park last Saturday, and that proved it. I said it proved nothing, because we did not know then that he was one of the wealthiest boys in the county. However he seemed very bitter.

"Did you really give him so much encouragement? Of course men _do_ think it a lot if you let them kiss you. Aren't they stupid? They can't understand that even if one does not love them overmuch one wants to know what it's like. And you _did_ like pretending you were deeply in love, didn't you now?--all the time? I tell you who'll be glad you've gone, Alice Dewlap. She was sweet on Charlie long before you met him, because Kitty told me so.

"Oh, Leo, you were a wicked creature, a regular godsend!

What shall we do without you! _Do_ ask me to come soon.

That's cool, isn't it? Asking for an invitation. But you know what I mean. Think of me in church next Sunday. Good Lord deliver us! Tell me what to say to Charlie if he bothers me about you again. And don't forget to tell me all that happens in London. Describe all the men you meet minutely,--you know to the smallest detail as you used to here. You taught me to notice heaps of things I should never have thought of.

"Good-bye my dearest treasure-trove, with heaps of love and kisses.

"Yours for ever and ever,

"Nessy."

The old gentleman lost sight of Leonetta during the lunch interval; but when she returned from the restaurant car, slightly flushed, and her eyelids lazily drooping, he concluded that she had probably partaken heartily of the good fare provided, more particularly as a few stray crumbs still clung about the corners of her lips, betraying to his experienced eye the unconscious eagerness which healthy people habitually show over their meals. Wisely he did not infer from these evidences of a youthful and unimpaired appetite that she was slovenly in her table manners, because the unmistakable gentleness of her upbringing precluded any such possibility. The observation merely confirmed his general impression of her, and left him pondering over the relationship of daintiness to health.

Drowsily the girl re-opened the letter which she had been perusing before the luncheon hour, and re-read it once or twice; then dropping it listlessly upon her lap, she turned upon her fellow-passengers a look of such guileless interest that they might have been excused had they been moved by that compassion, so frequently unwarranted, for innocence on the threshold of Life's great adventure.

The letter she held had been brought to her that morning by Vanessa's maid. Leonetta and Vanessa had made friends the moment they first met, and when Vanessa, duly qualified, had left the School of Domesticity, about six months after Leonetta's arrival there, they had continued to see each other outside its walls. There was a difference of only a year in their ages, Vanessa being the elder; but the younger girl with her greater keenness of vision, more exuberant health and spirits, and more resolute unscrupulosity, had so carried the heart of the other by storm that it was Vanessa, the provincial termagant, who looked up to and worshipped her sister dare-devil of the Metropolis, and who watched her for her every cue.

The train was nearing London; already the coquettish veil of smoke with which the "hub of the Universe" conceals the full horror of her ugliness from the eyes of critics, gave the summer sky a murky yellow tinge.

Leonetta yawned, glanced across the vast city which she hoped would hence-forward be her home, and then suddenly recollecting that her mother and sister would probably be at King's Cross to meet her, quickly folded the letter that was lying on her lap and relegated it to one of the interstices of her pocket-portfolio.

CHAPTER V

Leonetta was home again and the old house in Kensington felt the change acutely. The stairs creaked in a manner almost indignant; doors which for months had disported themselves with quiet dignity, manifested a sudden and youthful tendency to slam; Palmer, the parlour-maid could never be found, except at the heels of her youngest mistress, who seemed to have requisitioned her entire services; while a fresh young voice, as imperious as it was melodious, could be heard on almost every floor at the same time, calling the stately rooms back to life again, and shivering the cobwebs of monotony as it were by acoustic principles alone.

The expression of the kindly maiden aunt, who, after having played for some while with a boisterous and powerful young nephew, gradually realises that he is becoming too rough for her, is, as everybody knows, one of tremulous expectancy, in which a half-frightened flickering smile plays only a deceptive and scarcely convincing part in concealing the feelings of anxiety and disapproval that lie behind it.

Now there was, as we have seen, little of the maiden aunt in Mrs.

Delarayne's disposition, and yet this is precisely the expression which, from the moment of Leonetta's arrival at King's Cross, had fastened upon her features. It was the look of one who, though anxious to humour a youthful relative as far as possible, was nevertheless determined that the young creature's pranks should not be allowed to extend to incendiarism, personal assault and battery, homicide, or anything equally upsetting. It scarcely requires description: the brows are permanently slightly raised, the eyes are kept steadily upon the youthful relative in question in mingled astonishment and fear, while there is the aforesaid agitated smile, which threatens at any moment to assume the hard and petulant lines of impatient reproach.

Leonetta had quite properly insisted upon a completely new outfit. She had not "unpacked" in the accepted sense. She had simply emptied her boxes into the dust-bin. Some of her things, it is true, had fallen to Palmer, and to Wilmott, her mother's maid, but very few of them, indeed, had she been willing to return to her wardrobe or her chests of drawers.

No one could take exception to this procedure. It was perfectly right and proper. It was the way it was done, as if it had been a forgone and incontrovertible conclusion, that unnerved Mrs. Delarayne, and drove Cleopatra, more abashed than indignant, to the quietest corner of the house for peace and solitude.

Obviously Leonetta had as yet received no check from life, no threat of an obstacle, or worse still a snub. Her pride pranced with an assurance, a certainty, that was at once baffling and unbaffled. In the presence of her sister's unbroken and unshaken will and resolute assertion of her smallest rights, Cleopatra shrank as before the force of an elemental upheaval. Her tottering self-confidence swayed ominously in the neighbourhood of the younger girl, and it was with alarm and helplessness in her eyes, that she sought a refuge where she could breathe undisturbed.

In the library she dropped desperately into a chair, and her glance ran nervously up and down the bookshelves, while her ears listened stealthily for echoes of the voice that was subordinating the house.

She had forgotten during these blissful months how beautiful her sister was. Some mysterious power in her, that found it easy to forget these things, had even led her memory to form quite a moderate estimate of Leonetta's charms in her absence,--even her sister's telling tricks with her hair had been completely banished from her mind.

Cleopatra rose and walked to the fire-place. On the mantelpiece, she knew, there was a photograph of herself at Leonetta's age. She felt she wanted to examine this record of her adolescence. She was groping for strength: she wished to fortify herself.

She drew the photograph towards her. No, she had not changed so very much. Only something inside her seemed to have grown less tense, less self-confident. Also, she had not had Leonetta's advantages,--advantages that she herself had been chiefly instrumental in securing for her younger sister. More arts than that of wielding the French tongue are learned in Paris. Apparently she never had arranged her hair quite as Baby arranged hers.

And then, all at once, the door opened, and she pushed the photograph violently from her, so that it fell with a clatter on the marble of the mantelpiece. It was her mother; and as the door opened and shut, the sound of Leonetta's voice upstairs swelled and died away again.

"Oh, it's you," Cleopatra cried, setting up the fallen frame.

Mrs. Delarayne walked to the window, spasmodically drew back a curtain, and then turned to face her daughter.

"She's amazingly high-spirited, isn't she?"

"Extraordinary!" Cleopatra exclaimed.

"Can you go with her to Mlle. Claude's to-morrow to order those frocks?

You see, I have my Inner Light meeting in the afternoon."

"She won't like it."

"What does it matter? She won't listen to my suggestions, so I might just as well stay at home as go with her. She knows exactly what she wants down to the last button."