The piquancy of it delighted him, and he laughed delightedly, and for some reason had a stronger sense of her rare beauty. Not yet, not yet the truth, but nearer yet, even as such truth advances by the strangest and most secret steps.
"Tell me, though, Dora!"
"Oh, how it can interest you I am puzzled to imagine! Pleasant enough things, then. There are twelve of us there, all English, I am glad to say. We never speak English, though—always French; and then there are German and Italian days; they make us laugh very much."
As icicles broken in the hand!
Her laughter had caused the shades on her cheek to glow. He gazed at her in sheerest admiration; felt a new stirring of his blood; felt his breath quicken. She was close, close to him. The little breezes that had attended her, and had gone as if asulk at his intrusion, came with a sudden little fury to win her back again, and smote him full with all the fragrance that she had, and tossed her scarf and tossed her skirt against him.
She drew back her skirt, using the hand that held the pansies she had gathered. The action brushed his hand with hers and with her flowers.
Not yet, not yet the truth, but almost come! He slipped his fingers about her wrist, holding her hand mid-breast between them. "Give me those flowers, Dora."
She slower in approaching it, but suspicious again of some strange element in the air, as a fawn that lifts a doubtful head to question a new thing in the breeze. "You have one buttonhole already," she told him, her voice not very easy.
He looked down at Ima's wild rose in his coat. "That's nothing," he said, and began to remove it whence it was pinned.
He was clumsy, for his hand trembled—the other still had hers. He was clumsy. Thoughts, thoughts, were at hammer in his brain—new to him, fierce to him and, as from iron in a forge, striking a glow that glowed within his eyes.