his, at animosities he could never feel, at rivalries that never touched him, at meannesses that could not have lived for a moment in the generous expanses of his mind.
But, as he looked now at Valerie, he forgot what other women had done to him. He moved very quietly to sit down on the edge of the hollow till she should wake. But something, the sense of life, or the smell of his pipe startled her, and she sat up quickly, and seeing him rubbed her eyes as if she were in a dream.
“Why, it is you!” she said, staring at him.
He looked down whimsically at himself as if he needed corroboration, and then he smiled at her. Now, as for the first time she saw him in broad daylight, she saw that the sun worked magic in his eyes, turning them to gentian blue, and that something in the optical machinery in his head darkened and lightened them, as if they were lenses at the ends of tubes lit and dimmed by multiple lights and screens behind. And she thought of the words the King of the City said to Shrí in the old Sanscrit tale, “Thy dark blue eyes have utterly destroyed my sense of right and wrong, which are now mere words without meaning, impotent to hold me.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you. I was going to play the guardian knight. You are all right again? I rode in on Friday evening to ask Doc Steele.”
“I know you did. He told me. Now tell me the story. What did you do with me?”
With the omission of his own emotional moments he told what had happened without elaboration. She watched him as he talked sitting now opposite her with his face turned towards the sea, and his hair stirring about his head, very fine black hair, that even in the sunlight had no suspicion of a sheen upon it.
