Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/145

 seemed to him the most elusive woman he had ever known. To herself she seemed nothing—seaweed floating in ocean currents, or a tree bending before wind.

'Will you always love me, always, Anthony?'

He lifted her hand from the heap of brown velvet and kissed the fingers.

'No, not always.'

'Anthony!'

'Now you are flower leaves and silk, and now I love you, not ten years or twenty years when you are grey and I am palsied...darling...'

Time, he told her, had made her, had taken twenty-five years for her perfecting, but time would as surely destroy her. Her pulses throbbed. He flung himself against her, his voice broke. At that moment she was for him all the women that time had ever made only to confound. She was the symbol of the thing that had obsessed him from youth.

'Lanice,' he begged, 'don't love me too much! Don't love me too long! But for God's sake love me now!'

At last dinner was served. 'We'll wait no longer for the others.' At last the port was drunk, the candles guttered, and the big hearth log fell to embers. Then Jones left the girl and went soberly to the horses. He did not go back to the inn until they were harnessed. Then he found Lanice, white and heavy-eyed, huddled in her furs as an owl huddles in his feathers, holding the black cat in her lap. The great moon on the snow made a new and colder day. The