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g more!"
She lifted her hand with a commanding gesture as though unconsciously,--then let it drop at her side. Lydia Herbert looked at her perplexedly.
"You talk so very strangely!" she said.
Morgana smiled.
"Yes, I know I do!" she admitted--"I am what old Scotswomen call 'fey'! You know I was born away in the Hebrides,--my father was a poor herder of sheep at one time before he came over to the States. I was only a baby when I was carried away from the islands of mist and rain--but I was 'fey' from my birth--"
"What is fey?" interrupted Miss Herbert.
"It's just everything that everybody else is NOT"--Morgana replied-- "'Fey' people are magic people; they see what no one else sees,-- they hear voices that no one else hears--voices that whisper secrets and tell of wonders as yet undiscovered--" She broke off suddenly. "We must not stay talking here"--she resumed-"All the folks will say we are planning the bridesmaids' dresses and that the very day of the ceremony is fixed! But you can be sure that I am not going to marry anybody--least of all Roger Seaton!"
"You like him though! I can see you like him!"
"Of course I like him! He's a human magnet,--he 'draws'! You fly towards him as if he were a bit of rubbed sealing-wax and you a snippet of paper! But you soon drop off! Oh, that valse! Isn't it entrancing!"
And, swinging herself round lightly like a bell-flower in a breeze she danced off alone and vanished in the crowd of her guests.
Lydia Herbert recalled this conversation now, as she stood looking from the vine-clad verandah of her hotel towards the sea, and again saw, as in a vision, the face and eyes of her "fey" friend,--a face by no means beautiful in feature, but full of a sparkling attraction which was almost irresistible.
"Nothing in her!" had declared New York society generally--"Except her money! And her hair--but not even that unless she lets it down!"
Lydia had seen it so "let down," once, and only once, and the sight