CHAPTER XVIII
I
One warm night in the following February Valerie lounged on Dane’s verandah, as near as she could to the edge without letting the chair topple over. Such little coolness as there was on the river came up through the clearing to be dissipated by the lingering warmth and heavy scents of the garden.
A half-finished cigarette disintegrated into ash in a copper tray beside her. She had put it down when Dane had begun to sing L’heure Exquise. She always forgot that there could be any other kind of hour when he sang to her. He had not a strong voice, but it had a quality that filled her with a tingling delight. She forgot now her hours of anxiety about him in the last months, her increasing sense of some invisible disrupting influence that was coming up between them. But they still loved each other after two years, loved each other beyond any doubt, she told herself.
Valerie had changed in those two years. Her manner had softened. Her voice was fuller and lower. She was less positive in expression, more sympathetic in judgment. Physically she was more alive than she had ever been. Her maiden leanness had disappeared, and her shapely limbs were rounded to alluring curves. And about her there was always the glow of splendid health. It was this that made it hard for her to realize at times what it could mean to lack vitality.
But as Dane sang she was not thinking of his health,
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