Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/284

 tip of his finger; the coloring in the rug beneath his feet was half obliterated by a layer of dirt, that rose in little puffs when the man moved.

Pervading all, indeed, was that penetrating, insisted atmosphere of an abandoned dwelling, the indefinable musty, uninhabited odor that lingers within rooms them have once known, but, through the lapse of time, have well-nigh forgotten, the footsteps, the voices, the laughter and the burdens of men's lives—and women's.

And over all, too, brooded the compelling silence of dead homes—the stillness that abides in those tombs of human emotion, seeming fairly to shriek aloud its resentment of alien intrusion.

In it the sigh of the night wind through a distant window was loud and arresting; the rustle of the acacia's leaves shrilled high and clear; and to O'Rourke, upon whose optimistic, gregarious self the quietness jarred, the regular rise and fall of human respiration near to him was a distinct comfort.

He stood motionless for full a minute, from the first quite aware that the woman had secreted herself and was watching him from her retreat; he bore the scrutiny with the grace that was ever his—with an attitude of forbearing patience.

And then, as he had told himself it would befall, the draperies rustled and the woman stood before him.

Certain it is that she had never seemed so lovely to the man—even in his wildest dreams—nor so desirable; a breathing, pulsating incarnation of modern beauty in that rose-tinted boudoir of dead and forgotten loves.

She was still in her evening gown; her light cloak of black silk had slipped aside, exposing bare, gleaming arms and shoulders pf a pellucid alabaster in their dark frame.

As for the eloquent face of her, it seemed more than ever