It was impossible to keep the subject out of his mind, as he returned to the racecourse with Jessie; and it recurred again and again that night, which he passed, with the Floyds, in the house of friends at Newbern. A whole rout of bewildering surmises and baffled guesses beset him. If Adela really looked at all like his Jessie, why, he asked himself, had not others discovered it? Why hadn't Jessie herself remarked the fact? But then, on the other hand, the thing was so unlikely, and the positions of the two women were so far apart, that no one here would be apt to notice or for a moment consider such a supposition.
It was not until they were once more, at Fairleigh Park that he looked a second time at the belt which they had bought From Adela. Sitting with Jessie and her father, in the evening, when they were talking over the experience on the rail and at the races, he glanced over the various purchases which had been made, most of them of a more ambitious sort; but when they came to the belt, he studied it with a good deal of care, feeling an interest both in its novelty and in the maker.
Did he dream, or was this another illusion? The angular pattern in the midst of the design, which he had before noticed, unexpectedly assumed a meaning to his eyes. The more sharply he scanned it, the less he doubted his senses, for the beaded lines took with increasing clearness the forms of letters; and, on tracing these out, one after another, he saw that they composed a series of words arranged in coherent order--briefly, a motto.
I am not afraid of being old-fashioned. Therefore I shall ask my reader if he ever came upon any sight--ever was smitten, either in thought or in reading, by any feeling that set a thousand flame-points tingling around his brain, and sent irresistible waves of cold, nervous thrill down his spine. By this I do not mean a thrill of horror, but of supreme and overwhelming emotion that instantly suggests your being in the grasp of some more than human power--the power of endless, ideal forces, directed upon the human organism from without, as the harper's hand is directed with omnipotent sweep upon the strings of his instrument. If my reader, as aforesaid, has had such experience, he will understand the strange, exalting shock of wonder and awe that vibrated through Lance's system when he discerned in the wording on the belt: