touch of her, when he had caught
her in his arms, lingered, as the memory of the harp music on his inner
ear, pricking his senses like fine musk, a thing of soft new pulses
flashing over him like spurts of vapor.

As he threw off his coat in the bedroom he had chosen for his own, he
felt the hard corner of the _Lucile_ in the pocket, and drawing it out,
laid it on the table by the bedside. He seemed to feel again the tingle
of his cheek where a curling strand of her coppery hair had sprung
against it when her head had bent beside his own to read the marked
lines. By now perhaps that riotous crown was all unbound and falling
redly about her shoulders, those shoulders no longer peeping from a
weave of lilies, but draped in virginal white. Perhaps she knelt now by
her silk-covered bed, warming the coverlid with her breast, her
down-bent face above her locked palms. What did she pray for, he
wondered. As a child, his own prayers had been comprehensive ones. Even
the savages who lived at Wishing-House and their innumerable offspring
had been regularly included in those petitions.

When he had undressed he sat an hour in the candle-blaze, a
dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders, striving vainly to recreate
that evening call, to remember her every word and look and movement. For
a breath her face would flush suddenly before him, like a live thing;
then it would mysteriously fade and elude him, though he clenched his
hands on the arms of his chair in the fierce mental effort to recall it.
Only the intense blue of her eyes, the tawny sweep of her hair--these
and the touch of her, the consciousness of her warm and vivid fragrance,
remained to wrap all his senses in a mist woven of gold and fire.

* * * * *

Shirley, meanwhile, had sat some time beside her mother's bed, leaning
from a white chintz-covered chair, her anxiety only partially allayed by
reassurances, now and then stooping to lay her young cheek against the
delicate arm in its lacy sleeve or to pass her hand lovingly up and down
its outline, noting with a recurrent passion of tenderness the
transparency of the skin with its violet veining and the shadows beneath
the closed eyes. Emmaline, moving on soft worsted-shod feet about the
dim room, at length had whispered:

"You go tuh baid, honey. I stay with Mis' Judith till she go tuh sleep."

"Yes, go, Shirley," said her mother. "Haven't I any privileges at all?
Can't I even faint wh