She heard Sam coming down the road, and through the silvery gauze of night she saw the red flare of his pipe. She turned into her own room and sat down on the bed, her little, high-instepped feet on the floor, her hands clasped between her knees. XXVII The events which took place at Chesters’ that adventurous night had a remarkable effect on the young master of the place. After Ann Boyd had left him he restlessly paced the floor of the long veranda. Blind fury and unsatisfied passion held him in their clutch and drove him to and fro like a caged and angry lion. The vials of his first wrath were poured on the heads of his meddlesome guests, who had so unceremoniously thrust themselves upon him at such an inopportune moment, and from them his more poignant resentment was finally shifted to the woman whom for years he, with the rest of the community, had contemptuously regarded as the partner in his father’s early indiscretions. That she—such a character—should suddenly rise to remind him of his duty to his manhood, and even enforce it under his own roof, was the most humiliating happening of his whole life. These hot reflections and secret plans for revenge finally died away and were followed by a state of mind that, at its lowest ebb, amounted to a racking despair he had never known. Something told him that Ann Boyd had spoken grim truth when she had said that Virginia would never again fall under his influence, and certainly no woman had ever before so completely absorbed him. Up to this moment it had been chiefly her rare beauty and sweetness of nature that had charmed him, but now he began to realize the grandeur of her character and the depths to which her troubles had stirred his sympathies. As he recalled, word by word, all that had passed between them in regard to her nocturnal visit, he was forced to acknowledge that it was only through her absorbing desire to save her mother that she, abetted by her very purity of mind, had been blindly led into danger. He flushed and shuddered under the lash of the thought that he, himself, had constituted that danger.