Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/69

Rh listening to everything, and reading all the books she could lay her hands on; and she got so bitten with Oriental archaeology that she took a course last year at Bryn Mawr. She means to go to Bagdad next spring, and back by the Persian plateau and Turkestan."

Susy laughed luxuriously: she was sitting with her hand in Nick's, while the late moon—theirs again—rounded its orange-coloured glory above the belfry of San Giorgio.

"Poor Coral! How dreary—" Susy murmured.

"Dreary? Why? A trip like that is about as well worth doing as anything I know."

"Oh, I meant: dreary to do it without you or me, she laughed, getting up lazily to go indoors. A broad band of moonlight, dividing her room onto two shadowy halves, lay on the painted Venetian bed with its folded-back sheet, its old damask coverlet and lace-edged pillows. She felt the warmth of Nick's enfolding arm and lifted her face to his.

The Hickses retained the most tender memory of Nick's sojourn on the Ibis, and Susy, moved by their artless pleasure in meeting him again, was glad he had not followed her advice and tried to elude them. She had always admired Strefford's ruthless talent for using and discarding the human material in his path, but now she began to hope that Nick would not remember her suggestion that he should mete out that measure to the Hickses. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big