"But how did you know anything about it--or what I had--or what I
drank? You never once raised your eyelids all the time!"
"Perhaps I can see through them when I want to--who knows!" and she
laughed.
"And you wanted to--wanted to see through them?"
He was gazing at her now, and she suddenly looked down, while the most
beautiful transparent pink flushed her soft white cheeks, turning her
into a tender girl almost. The change was so sudden, it startled Paul,
and emboldened him.
"You wanted to!" he repeated in a glad voice. "You wanted to see me?"
"Yes," she whispered, and she looked up at him, but this time there
was mischief in her eyes.
"Is that why you sighed then among the ivy? What made you sigh?"
She paused a moment, and then she said slowly: "A number of
things. You seemed so young, and so beautiful, and so--asleep."
"Indeed I wasn't asleep!" Paul exclaimed. "It would take a great deal
more port than that to make me go to sleep. I was thinking of--" And
then he saw she had not meant that kind of sleep, and felt a fool--and
wondered.
She helped him out.
"All this time you have not told me why you were upset--upset enough
to drink bad port. That was naughty of you, Paul."
"I was upset--over you. I was angry because I was so interested--" and
he reddened again.
She leant back among the purple cushions, her figure so supple in its
lines, it made him think of a snake. She half closed her eyes
again--and she spoke low in a dreamy voice:
"It was fate, Paul. I knew it when I entered the room. I felt it again
among the green trees, and so I ran from you--but to-night it is
_plus fort que moi_--so I called you to come in."
"I am so glad--so _glad_," said Paul.
She remained silent. Her eyes in their narrowed lids gleamed at him,
seeming to penetrate into his very soul. And now he noticed her mouth
again. It neither drooped nor smiled, it was straight, and chiselled
and strong, and small rather, and the lower lip was rounded and
slightly cleft in the centre. A most appetising red flower of a mouth.
By this time Paul was more or less intoxicated with excitement, he had
lost all sense of time and place. It seemed as if he had known her
always--that there never had been a moment when she had not filled the
whole of his horizon.
They were both silent for a couple of minutes. As far as he could
gather from her inscrutable face, she was weighing things--what
things?
Suddenly she sprang up, one of those fine movements of hers full of
cat-like grace.
"Paul," she said, "listen," and she spoke rather fast. "You are so
young, so young--and I shall hurt you--probably. Won't you go
now--while there is yet time? Away from Lucerne, back to Paris--even
back to England. Anywhere away from me."
She put her hand on his arm, and looked up into his eyes. And there
were tears in hers. And now he saw that they were grey.
He was moved as never yet in all his life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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