Page:The vintage; a romance of the Greek war of independence (IA vintageromanceof00bensrich).pdf/154

 langh and then held his eyes open so that they could not shut? She would have liked to try.

Then Mitsos—she felt it in her bones—evidently liked her very much, in quite a different way from which any one had liked her before. Zuleika liked her in a tepid, intermittent manner; but when her tooth ached she ignored her altogether, and had once slapped her in the face for a too obtrusive sympathy. And when Abdul came and took her chin between his fingers and turned up her face to his, and told her that she was getting very pretty, she turned cold all over. It reminded her of the way he had pointed at one of the turkeys in the yard and said is was becoming beautifully fat. Again, it had been quite unaccountably delightful to sit close to Mitsos and shelter under him from the wind, to be close to him and know him near. Finally, when they parted that night, and she had brushed back the curls from his forehead and kissed him, her feeling had been more unaccountable still. She had done it unthinkingly, but the moment it was done a whole mill-race of thoughts went bubbling unbidden through her head. She wanted to do it again, she wanted him to take her in his arms and press her close to him—she would not mind if it hurt. She hated Zuleika. She understood in a moment why, if Mitsos knew the least part of what she felt, he should have been angry when she told him what Zuleika said, and the next words had come out of her month outstripping, so it seemed, her thought. Then she had fel suddenly shy and frightened; she longed to stop where, she was, for surely Mitsos understood what was so intimate to her. And so, being a woman, she instantly ran away, and never looked behind.

To-night she had sat by the wall for half an hour before he came, and the thought that perhaps he would