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Lizzie looked, though Laura thought that she did not. Lizzie had always looked, for, try as she might, she could only bridle and not master her wayward thoughts.
She peeped from beneath the lowered golden fringe of modest maiden lashes and she peered around fingers and handkerchiefs and fans and she darted glances as swift as arrows, as mild as doves, as knowing as serpents.
The whole village knew her as cautious and kind, fussing and bustling, all sweet shyness and sisterly affection. No one, not even her sister -- especially not her sister, dear Laura, lovely Laura, heedless Laura -- must ever suspect, must ever spy her spying. She was so careful because she was afraid of what she might do if she looked any longer. She was so careful because she was afraid what she might do to anyone who looked back at her.
How well she remembered the last day that poor lost Jeanie had ever laughed! The young men of the village had clustered all around her like bees to a flower, drinking her up. Lizzie had halted on her way, pausing to steal a glance, and become entranced.
"How lost poor Lizzie looks without her Laura!" Jeanie had cried with merry dismay. "Let us walk home together, my dear." She shook off her buzzing suitors as easily as flies and seized upon Lizzie, who had frozen like a rabbit in a glen, helpless in the face of the fox's intent approach.
"It is a quarter of a mile out of your way," she protested feebly. She felt a flame on her fair cheeks like to match the fires that smoldered where Jeannie's careless hand clasped her own arm.
"Oh, but this is such a lovely day! It would be a crime not to stay out late in this golden sunshine and soak up every hour."
Lizzie, tongue-tied, nodded dumb assent, and so they went, Jeanie chattering like a magpie, Lizzie chirping 'yes' or 'no'. She found her own life dull and straitened compared with Jeanie's merry whirl and struggled in vain to find something to say, while keeping the traitorous quaver in her voice at bay.
She was almost glad when she heard the queer tramping and stamping that betokened the wicked, fascinating goblin men. They filled the air with their cries, "Come buy! Come buy!"
"They say that goblin fruit is always full and ripe, even in the dead of winter," Jeanie confided to her in in a whisper. Lizzie was shocked right down to her soul.
"How can any good and wholesome fruit come from a twisted, withered vine?" she demanded. "They must lie."
Jeanie only laughed at all her dismay. "You may be right," she conceded. "Perhaps we shall not scruple so when the days are short and cold and we have all but forgotten what it is like to bite into a ripe, sun-kissed peach, the warm juices running down our chins."
"Better to forget," Lizzie said sharply. She willed herself to heed her own advice, to fold away her thoughts as deep and cold and tightly furled as a daffodil bulb beneath the winter snow, but Jeanie's hand on hers was warm.
At last they reached the welcoming gate and Lizzie hoped to escape temptation, but Jeanie lingered and held her there, talking of this young man and that as twilight deepened all around. The stars were peeping out at them when Lizzie desperately said, "I think I hear Laura, calling me to bed."
"You are so lucky to have a sister!" Jeanie exclaimed with a wistful sigh. "Someone to cheer and console you, tend and defend you always."
Lizzie heartily agreed and wished her sister by her side to steady her, but she was in bed with a vicious cold in her head, and should not venture out into the autumn chill.
"You are so dear and sensible, Lizzie," Jeanie went on, her wide lips curving with a smile, "I should like to have a sister exactly like you."
She planted a kiss on Lizzie's scarlet cheek and it burned like a brand.
"O Jeanie, Jeanie," Lizzie cried when she could speak. "Your house is back that way again! You are heading towards the glen!"
"I mean to spy on goblin men beneath this lovely harvest moon," Jeanie said with a careless laugh. "Mayhap I'll fetch you back an apple from their stalls, for winter is coming soon."
Lizzie thought, Your lips are sweeter than apples. Still laughing, Jeanie vanished in the dusk, like a puff of smoke or an errant dream, leaving behind the smoldering flame.
No one had a kind thing to say when gay Jeanie came home wan and grey, wasting away. Their cruel words made Lizzie writhe, as the men who had begged Jeanie to step out with them in a dance now claimed that they had always thought her destined for a bad end, and the girls who had pretended friendship cast her aside like a withered nosegay. How unkind the world was to those who looked, who laughed, who stepped out beneath the moonlight into an inverted world!
The grave was an open wound in the snowy ground that cut Lizzie to the bone. She shook out her papers of daisy-seeds treasured from the spring, tokens of the innocent beauty that had been lost, but they poked up through the soil stunted and lost and never bloomed. She wondered whether goblin men had stolen all of Jeanie's maiden sweetness to plump and swell their unholy winter fruits, leaving none for chaste and wholesome flowers, or whether it was her own secret guilt that poisoned her virginal plot.
Still, she had her sister, laughing, bright-eyed Laura, all sweetness without a spot of canker or rot. Poor Jeanie had not had a sister, though Lizzie would have been one to her, if only she had not wanted so desperately to be something else to her instead. She wound her arms about Laura tightly and bowed her head.