"Are you going to be disagreeable to me, Garry?"
"You darling!" he said; and, laughing, yet secretly dismayed at her own
perversion, she hurriedly untwisted her fingers from his and made a new
and fervid promise to replace the one just broken.
The moonlight was magnificent, silvering forest, dune, and chaparral.
Far to the east a thin straight gleam revealed the sea.
She seated herself under the wall, lying back against it; he lay
extended on the marble shelf beside her, studying the moonlight on her
face.
"What was it you had to tell me, Shiela? Remember I am going in the
morning."
"I've turned cowardly; I cannot tell you.... Perhaps later.... Look at
the Seminole moon, Garry. They have such a pretty name for it in
March--Tau-sau-tchusi--'Little Spring Moon'! And in May they call it the
'Mulberry Moon'--Kee-hassi, and in November it is a charming
name--Hee-wu-li--'Falling Leaf Moon'!--and August is Hyothlucco--'Big
Ripening Moon.' ... Garry, this moonlight is filling my veins with
quicksilver. I feel very restless, very heathenish." ... She cast a
slanting side-glance at him, lips parting with soundless laughter; and
in the witchery of the moon she seemed exquisitely unreal, head tipped
back, slender throat and shoulders snow-white in the magic lustre that
enveloped them.
Resting one bare arm on the marble she turned, chin on shoulder, looking
mischievously down at him, lovely, fresh, perfect as the Cherokee roses
that spread their creamy, flawless beauty across the wall behind her.
Imperceptibly her expression changed to soft friendliness, to
tenderness, to a hint of deeper emotion; and her lids drooped a little,
then opened gravely under the quick caress of his eyes; and very gently
she moved her head from side to side as reminder and refusal.
"Another man's wife," she said deliberately.... "Thy neighbour's
wife.... That's what we've done!"
Like a cut of a whip her words brought him upright to confront her, his
blood tingling on the quick edge of anger.
For always, deep within him, lay that impotent anger latent; always his
ignorance of this man haunted him like the aftermath of an ugly dream.
But of the man himself she had never spoken since that first day in the
wilderness. And then she had not named him.
Her face had grown very serious, but her eyes remained unfathomable
under his angry gaze.
"Is there any reason to raise that spectre between us?" he demanded.
"Dear, has it ever been laid?" she asked sorrowfully.
The muscles in his cheeks tightened and his eyes narrowed unpleasantly.
Only the one feature saved the man from sullen commonness in his
suppressed anger--and that was his boyish mouth, clean, sweet, nobly
moulded, giving the lie to the baffled brutality gleaming in the eyes.
And the spark died out as it had come, subdued, extinguished when he
could no longer sustain the quiet surprise of her regard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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