Page:Son of the wind.djvu/141

RV 129 "Well, hereabouts—over to the great stone face, perhaps."

A film of reserve dulled her wide-open bright eyes. They turned from his. "Why come so far? Three steps out of the house or seven miles, the feel- ing is just the same, isn't it?"

She left him expectant, baffled, and, to make the business harder, his mind kept straying from what he wanted to think of to her. The magnetic sense of her near him, the appearance of her, kept getting between him and his reason. In the cool shade the dusky ivory of her skin looked white and luminous, her eyes blue-black. She was herself a creature of night, of bright lights and velvety shadows, of qualities and textures rather than line and color. It was not the color of her mouth, at best but a pale red, nor even the form, but the expression of it when she smiled which so profoundly disturbed the senses. "I think the feeling would be very different out here," he said positively.

She glanced at him, no longer confidentially, sidelong and rather mockingly. "What would the people say to me, running out here in the middle of the night?"

"I thought you had been out here at that hour before?"

"Never!" She seemed to toss that idea lightly