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 Forester, 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.
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