Or, maybe he was sitting in the lonely library, with some volume from its shelves on his knees. She pictured Uncle Jefferson fetching his pipe and jar of tobacco and striking the match on his broad foot to light it. She remembered one of the old darky’s sayings: “Er man ain’ nachally no angel, but ’thouten terbacker, Ah reck’n he be pizen-ugly ernuf ter giv de Bad Man de toof-ache!” In that instant when her cheek had touched his rough tweed jacket, she had been sensible of that woodsy pipy fragrance. A vivid flush swept up her face and with a sudden gesture she caught her open palms to her cheek. With what a daring softness his eyes had hazed as they looked down at her under his crisp waving hair. Why was the memory of that look so sharply sweet? As she leaned, out of the stillness there came to her ear a mellow sound. It was the bell of the court-house in the village. She counted the strokes falling clearly or faintly as the sluggish breeze ebbed or swelled. It was eleven. She drew back, dropped the curtain to shut out the wan glimmer, and in the darkness crept into the soft bed as if into a hiding-place. [Pg 244] CHAPTER XXIX AT THE DOME A warm sun and an air mildly mellow. A faint gold-shadowed mist over the valley and a soft lilac haze blending the rounded outlines of the hills. A breeze shook the twigs on the cedars, fluttered the leaves of the poplars till they looked a quivering mass of palpitating silver, bearing away with it the cool elastic grace-notes of the dripping water, as it sparkled over the big green-streaked rocks at the foot of the little lake at Damory Court. Over the wild grape-vines a pair of drunken butterflies reeled, kissing wings, and on the stone rim of the fountain basin a tiny brown-green lizard lay motionless, sunning itself. Through the shrubbery a cardinal darted like a crimson shuttle, to rock impudently from a fleering limb, and here and there on the bluish-ivory sky, motionless as a pasted wafer, hung a hawk; from time to time one of these wavered and slanted swiftly down, to climb once more in a huge spiral to its high tower of sky.