e for a moment, when he looked away from the
young beauty sitting next him.

Elsie meantime had been silent, with that singular, still, watchful
look which those who knew her well had learned to fear. Her head just a
little inclined on one side, perfectly motionless for whole minutes, her
eyes seeming to, grow small and bright, as always when she was under her
evil influence, she was looking obliquely at the young girl on the
other side of her cousin Dick and next to Bernard Langdon. As for Dick
himself, she seemed to be paying very little attention to him. Sometimes
her eyes would wander off to Mr. Bernard, and their expression, as old
Dr. Kittredge, who watched her for a while pretty keenly, noticed, would
change perceptibly. One would have said that she looked with a kind of
dull hatred at the girl, but with a half-relenting reproachful anger at
Mr. Bernard.

Miss Letty Forrester, at whom Elsie had been looking from time to time
in this fixed way, was conscious meanwhile of some unusual influence.
First it was a feeling of constraint,--then, as it were, a diminished
power over the muscles, as if an invisible elastic cobweb were spinning
round her,--then a tendency to turn away from Mr. Bernard, who was
making himself very agreeable, and look straight into those eyes which
would not leave her, and which seemed to be drawing her towards them,
while at the same time they chilled the blood in all her veins.

Mr. Bernard saw this influence coming over her. All at once he noticed
that she sighed, and that some little points of moisture began to
glisten on her forehead. But she did not grow pale perceptibly; she
had no involuntary or hysteric movements; she still listened to him and
smiled naturally enough. Perhaps she was only nervous at being stared
at. At any rate, she was coming under some unpleasant influence or
other, and Mr. Bernard had seen enough of the strange impression Elsie
sometimes produced to wish this young girl to be relieved from it,
whatever it was. He turned toward Elsie and looked at her in such a way
as to draw her eyes upon him. Then he looked steadily and calmly into
them. It was a great effort, for some perfectly inexplicable reason.
At one instant he thought he could not sit where he was; he must go and
speak to Elsie. Then he wanted to take his eyes away from hers; there
was something intolerable in the light that came from them. But he was
determined to look her down, and he believed he could