others went to dress for
dinner.

XXV

At dinner-time Loring had another shock. This was the sight of Belinda
in evening dress. It was the full glare of her beauty that now smote
him, together with the sense of her having become suddenly some one
else. This was another person altogether--a new Linda. And yet Belinda
had sought to temper the effect of her first appearance thus attired.
She had a superstitious feeling that her coming-out ball at Newport was
to mark an important crisis in her life. Her gown for that occasion had
been carefully selected in Paris (by her--not by her mother). That is,
she had selected the gown as the one in which she meant to burst upon
Loring in the full splendour of her new womanhood. The ball would
furnish this opportunity.

She was sorry to have to lessen that cherished effect, even by this one
appearance in demi-toilette. So she had chosen the soberest gown in her
wardrobe. It was of dark purple chiffon. The long, _mousquetaire_
sleeves veiled her glinting arms. Her white breast was also veiled. But
nothing could subdue the flame of her ruddy coronal of hair. An oval
mole, black as her eyebrows, lay in the hollow of her white throat--one
of those outrageously perfect imperfections with which Nature loves
sometimes to seal her masterpieces. This mole was the final touch on the
heady lure of Belinda's beauty.

Loring's eyes were drawn to it unwillingly again and again. He marvelled
that he did not remember it. He even wondered if that "little devil!"
had not painted it herself upon the snow of her throat.

And whenever he looked at the soft, jet-black mole on the white throat,
that kiss of two years ago flamed in his blood as it had not flamed at
the time of its bestowal. But he was decent enough to be ashamed of this
feeling. He answered Belinda rather briefly on the few occasions that
she spoke to him. Somehow he did not trust her. Somehow (though this he
did not acknowledge to himself) he dreaded her. And he glanced from her
to Sophy--telling himself how much more really beautiful Sophy was in
her soft grey and pearls than Belinda in her pansy purple and rococo
necklace of amethysts and strass. But for the first time, against his
will, Sophy's beauty struck him as cold. And yet it was not cold,
though, within it, Sophy herself felt chill and numb. She, too, was
obsessed by Belinda. It was not so much the girl's flaring good looks
that obsessed her, but the thrilling, impe