Jalna. They could no more extricate themselves than the strands caught in the loom. Vibrating on the heat, she felt the deep-toned hum of the loom through all her being.
He was regarding her with heartless interest. "You mind?" he queried, mischievously. "You mind as much as that?"
"As much as what?" she asked angrily, hate for him rising in her.
"Your face! Oh, your face!" He changed the expression of his own visage into one of dolour. "It's like this!"
Tears of anger, of shame, stung her eyelids.
"And now you're going to cry! Is it for me? Or Renny? Or yourself? Tell me that, Alayne!"
She could not bear it. She turned and went swiftly toward the cottage. He remained a little, savouring the moment. He said to himself: "I am alive—I am alive! The worms are not gnawing me—yet!" He turned his hand about, examining the wrist that had been so round, so firm. "No mould—yet!" He felt his pulse. "Still kicking!"
He got up—it seemed to him that he felt stronger—and followed Alayne into the cottage.
The little Scotch maid was laying the table. Rags would be here any minute with their dinner. Through a crack of the door of Alayne's room he could see her standing before the little looking-glass, her hands raised to her hair. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and the graceful sweep of their lines brought to him a moment of remembered emotion. Not so long ago those arms had held him. Not so long ago delicate and extravagant caresses had passed between them. And how soon over! The remembrance of them as meaningless as a shadow from which the substance has fled.
But the shadow disturbed him. He wandered about the room, humming a tune.
Alayne came from her room. He looked at her with curiosity. His erotic proclivities, his sensitiveness, had given him the power of putting himself in the place of
