splendid neck and shoulders bare and little ringlets of hair curling
about her face as though scorched by the warmth of the red blood
below, he felt the picture complete.

She chatted with him before entering the dining-room.

Her manner was always flattering and frankly gracious, but to-night
there was an added note of warmth and familiar comradeship. Never
had he seen her so charming and so resistless. Always intensely
conscious of her sex, she seemed to have the power to-night of
communicating to the man before her that consciousness so intimately,
so directly and yet so delicately that he was led captive.

With scarcely a spoken word their relationship leaped the space of
years. The quiver of her eyelid, the dilation of a nostril, little
inarticulate exclamations, the turn of her head, the rising and
falling of her bosom, the flash of her violet eyes, the subtle
perfume of her hair or the graceful movement of her magnificent
form spoke the language of life deep and rhythmic which no words
have ever expressed.

He went home, on fire with the dream of an ideal life and work with
such a woman of supreme beauty.






CHAPTER IX