he act of relinquishing the sweetness beloved by bees; and, indeed,
from that whole spread of mortal consciousness which nature, moved by a
supreme necessity, has subjected to this world-wide tyranny.

She lifted her head as if striving to rise above that smothering flood,
and in the moonlight her face was revealed to him--her eyes humid, her
lips twisted into an unprecedented shape, her whole aspect, in its
startling maturity, like that of the immortal goddess whose genius and
nature had suddenly possessed this flesh and blood.

Rising, she turned away in a movement of denial that came too late. He
followed her to the end of the veranda; and there at last--or, as it
seemed to them, again--he took her in his arms. For an instant her
averted face imitated the marble nymph's face, her slender and flexible
body the nymph's struggling body, before she became limp at his kiss.

In the doorway of the dining room she paused to look back at the
veranda. She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were
tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see
anything distinctly. As she left the restaurant some one presented her
with a little bunch of flowers.

It was her wedding bouquet.

They were married in a village rectory. The minister, peering over his
horn-rimmed spectacles, stood before a mantelpiece on which a black
marble clock was flanked by clusters of wax fruit under glass.

Lilla borrowed a cloak from the minister's wife, and Lawrence drove
straight to New York.

CHAPTER XI

She appeared in the doorway of the living room wearing a white
burnoose, her pale brown hair caught up in a loose knot, her feet
thrust into yellow Moorish slippers much too large for her. In the
thin morning sunlight Lawrence, dressed for his journey, was locking a
metal trunk. Lilla sat down and fixed her eyes on the clock.

The furniture of the living room, gathered from various parts of the
Mohammedan world, was carved and inlaid. In the corners long-barreled
muskets, with stocks of mother of pearl, flanked cabinets full of
brittle copies of the Koran, witch doctors' switches, and outlandish
fetishes. Above these objects there dangled from the molding the
cagelike silver head armor of the Wadai cavalry horses, the tassels of
Algerian marriage palanquins, oval shields of bullock-hide and bucklers
of hammered brass, crude drums and harps from Uganda. On the four
walls, against pieces of reddish