He deftly tugged the boy's shirt out of his belt and peeled it off him, exposing a thin little brown body with a skin as fine as silk. When he felt the sun on his bare flesh the child made guttural sounds of delight, flinging himself backwards on the ground; and, supported by his elbows, letting his head tip back till his curls touched the grass. As the shielding locks fell away, Archie saw with a thrill which was almost repulsion, that dark brown hair grew thickly out of the boy's ears. . . . "Would he stay still, do you think?" he asked Désirée. "He will if I tell him," replied Désirée. "Come to me, Sylvestre," and drawing the child to her she stroked his head and whispered to him with a motherly gesture of which Archie would not have thought her capable. He had listened to her exceedingly modern views on the subject of the family, and her own strictly limited intentions in that respect. After the addition of Sylvestre the picture made great strides, even if the intimacy between Archie and Désirée advanced less rapidly than before. And yet every now and again, in sudden flashes of wildness, in a half-uttered phrase totally at variance with her normal self--little things that she seemed to remember from some forgotten whole, Désirée would give him that impression of being two people at once; and always, on these occasions, she was as puzzled as he, and with an added touch of something that seemed almost shame. For the everyday Désirée, that calm, practical and comely young woman, Archie's friendliness was touched by nothing warmer than the inevitable element of sex; but the shy, bold thing that sometimes peeped from between her lids, that thing that seemed to take possession of her beautiful body, and mock and allure and chill him in a breath, that thing was waking an answering spirit in himself, and he knew it. Miss Gould's portrait was unable to protect him from wakeful nights, when he turned his pillow again and again to find a cool surface for his cheek, nights when he would at last fling off the clothes and lean out of the window to watch the steel-blue dawn turn to the blessed light of everyday. He was living in a state of tension, and it seemed to him that some great event was holding its breath to spring, as though the very trees and rocks, the brooding sky and quiescent pools, were all in some conspiracy, hoodwinking yet preparing him for the moment of revelation.