CHAPTER V
IN WHICH WE MEET OLD FRIENDS
Morning with a glory of sun flooding in at the small aperture beneath
the gable and through every crack and cranny of timeworn roof and
walls; a glory to dazzle my sleepy eyes and fill me with ineffable
gladness, despite my cuts and bruises.
For a moment I lay blinking drowsily and then started to my elbow, my
every nerve a-thrill to the sound of a soft and regular breathing.
She lay within a yard of me, half-buried in the hay that clung about
her shapeliness; and beholding her thus in the sweet abandonment of
slumber, so altogether unconscious of my nearness, it was with a
half-guilty feeling that I leaned nearer to drink in her loveliness.
Her hair was disordered, and here and there a stalk of hay had
ensconced itself in these silky ripples, and no wonder, for observing
a glossy curl above her ear I had an urgent desire to feel it twined
about my finger, and shifted my gaze to her face, viewing in turn her
cheek rosy with sleep, her dark, curling lashes, her vivid lips, the
creamy whiteness of her throat.
But--even now, even as I mutely worshipped her thus, something in the
voluptuous beauty of her troubled me. Memory waked, Imagination burst
its shackles and began its fell work:
Other eyes than mine had seen her thus ... other hands ... other
lips.... Before me flashed a vision of Devereux's evil features
hatefully triumphant. And yet ... Great God, was this indeed the face
of a wanton? Could such horror possibly be?
In imagination the dead lived again, the past returned, and through my
closed lids I saw Devereux--her "slave and master" lean to gloat upon
her defenceless beauty, bold-eyed and on his cruel lips the smile of a
satyr.
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