CHAPTER XXXI.
AMONG THE SAND-HEAPS.
Coppinger held her in his arms, shook her hair out that it streamed over his arm, and looked into her up-turned face. "Indeed you are light, lighter than when I bore you in my arms before; and you are thin and white, and the eyes, how red. You have been crying. What! this spirit, strong as a steel spring, so subdued that it gives way to weeping!"
Judith's eyes were closed against the strong light from the sky above, and against the sight of his face bent over hers, and the fire glint of his eyes, dark as a thundercloud and as charged with lightnings. And now there was a flashing of fire from them, of love and pride and admiration. The strong man trembled beneath his burden in the vehemence of his emotion. The boiling and paining of his heart within him, as he held the frail child in his arms, and knew she was to be his own, his own wholly, in a short space. It was for the moment to him as though all earth and sea and heaven were dissolved with nebulous chaos, and the only life—the only pulses in the universe—were in him and the little creature he held to his breast. He looked into her face, down on her as Vesuvius must have looked down on lovely, marble, white Pompeii, with its gilded roofs and incense-scented temples, and restrained itself, as long as restrain its molten heart it could, before it poured forth its fires and consumed the pearly city lying in its arms.
He looked at her closed eyelids with the long golden lashes resting on the dark sunken dip beneath, at the delicate mouth drawn as with pain, at the white temples in which slowly throbbed the blue veins, at the profusion of red-gold hair streaming over his arm and almost touching the ground.
She knew that his eyes—on fire—were on her, and she
