'Come back to me. I don't like your going away in that strange way— forgetting me.'
'Ah, I like that. Say it again,' he returned, a deeper note in his voice.
'You were away—weren't you?'
'Perhaps,' he said slowly. 'I can't say quite. I was thinking of you, wherever I was.' He went on, holding her eyes with a steady gaze: 'A curious feeling came over me like—like heat and light. You seemed so familiar to me all of a sudden that I felt I had known you ages and ages. I was trying to make out where—it was——'
She dropped her eyelids again and peered at him, but no longer smiling. There was a sterner expression in her face. The lips curved a moment in a new strange way. The air seemed to waver an instant between them. She peered down at him as through a mist.…
'There—like that!' he exclaimed passionately. 'Only I wish you wouldn't. There's something I don't like about it. It hurts,'—and the same minute felt ashamed, as though he had said a foolish thing. It had come out in spite of himself.
'Then I won't, Tom—if you'll promise not to go away again. I was thinking of Egypt for a second—I don't know why.'
But he did not laugh with her; his face kept the graver expression still.
'It changes you—rather oddly,' he said quietly, 'that lowering of the eyelids. I can't say why exactly, but it makes you look——Eastern.' Again he had said a foolish thing. A kind of spell seemed over him.
'Irish eyes!' he heard her saying. 'They sometimes look like that, I'm told. But you promise, don't you?'