Mabel had not the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That
she had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence
of austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a
wound. The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she
was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her
disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her
own, and criticised as unbecoming the playful familiarity that
caused underlings and plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the
aristocrat's creed--to worship the ground on which she trod--the
censors in the court of etiquette conferred upon her altered
demeanor the patent of their approbation, averring, for the
thousandth time, that good blood would assert itself in the long run
and bring forth the respectable fruits of refinement, self-
appreciation, and condescension. The change had come over her by
perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression, dating--Mrs.
Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the sunset
hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation
upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one
evening, she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in
solitude. Neither had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet
to hide the forehead the cruel letter had, for a brief space, laid
low in the dust of anguished humiliation.
If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents crept
through the ranks of her associates, it died away for want of
confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and
the willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her
part in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding
her brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the
pleasure-seekers of the vicinity. She had not disdained the
assistance of her sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the
choice of the dresses that were to grace these merry-makings, and,
thanks to her own naturally excellent taste, now tacitly disputed
the palm of elegant attire with that lady. Her Christmas costume,
which, in many others of her age, would have been objected to by
critical fashionists, as old-maidish and grave, yet set off her pale
complexion--none of the Ayletts were rosy after they reached man's
or woman's estate--and heightened her distingue bearing into regal
grace. Yet it was only a heavy black silk, rich and glossy as satin,
cut, as was then the universal rule of evening dress, tolerably low
in the neck, with short sleeves; bunches of pomegranate-blossoms
and buds for breast and shoulder-knots, and among the classic braids
of her dark hair a half-wreath of the same.