Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/75

595 or prudishly, but with an unobtrusive, quiet definiteness which discouraged further demonstrations of affection.

Glowing summer burned itself to embers. Chestnut venders replaced flower sellers at street corners; leaves came fluttering to the sidewalks or changed their greens for ardent reds and browns and yellows. Haze lay on the Westchester and Jersey hills and a hint of frost was in the air. They stood listening to the lisping gossip of the waves against the sand while silence lay across the purple, silver-dusted sky where a few stars were enmeshed in gauzy light like dewdrops in a web. As yet there was no moon, but a pale radiance glowed out of the horizon, and the argent of it lay upon the tangled skeins of white-capped wavelets creeping tiptoe-quiet up the beach.

Softly, almost breathlessly, the words fell from her lips, and Abernathy turned on her, face blank with amazement.

Longfellow! "Ismet, for heaven's sake, tell me!" he begged. "You come from Egypt, yet you speak like an American; you know 'Lord Jeff,' you know Longfellow" He stopped, the breath blocked in his throat as suddenly as if a hand had been laid on it. Her eyes, tear-misted, pleading, came up to his beneath their long, curved, golden lashes, her face was white as if she had been dead an hour, and her full lips, so mobile usually, hung limply parted, yearning, slack with longing almost past endurance. She swayed toward him a very little, like a young tree bent before a sudden wind.

He caught her in his arms. "Ismet!" he whispered. "Ismet darling!"

But before his lips could find hers she had bent her body backward, taut as a drawn bow, one little hand pressed desperately against his chest, the other held across her mouth to shield it from his kiss. "Bismillah irrahman errahmin!" she gasped chokingly. "Who can escape what is written on his forehead?"

She was crying now, almost inaudibly, with short, dry sobs as hard and quick and tortured as the breathing of a spent runner, and the fingers of the hand against his breast were clutching at the rough tweed of his jacket as though they closed in rigor-mortis. "No, Hugh—no!" she begged. "You mustn't kiss me, mustn't touch me!"

"But, my dear, you love me, don't you"

"Awah!" The orientalism sounded strangely out of place and yet  Then, taking sudden mastery of herself: "Yes, I love you; love you as I never thought that I could love, but"—she pushed him back until she stood free from his arms, and her tear-filled eyes besought him—"but you mustn't say that you love me until I've told you who I" Her voice broke like a shattering glass, and another spasm of sharp sobbing shook her.

"Ismet!" he entreated. "This is what you've tried to tell me ever since we met, isn't it? Can't you—won't you—try to tell me now?"

She stepped back quickly, dodging deftly from the shelter of his out-stretched arms, and it seemed to him her face had hardened till it was an ivory mask with the mouth outlined in blood. "Come to me tomorrow night," she bade, lips moving stiffly,