Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/269

 sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and reduced.

But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside him, its purity focusing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.

He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at midnight with a pocket compass. He now saw him again, with an intuitive discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up her clouding associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. 'That man,' Henriot thought, 'might have come with me. He would have understood and loved it!' But the thought was really this⁠—a moment's reflection spread it, rather: 'He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert brought him out here.' And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water⁠—'What does he want with it? What is the deeper motive he conceals? For there is a deeper motive; and it is concealed.'

But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really, even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting. Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. And when at