"Perhaps."
Carleigh stared more frankly at her—at her head of gold, her brow of fairest ivory, set with gems of living amethyst beneath; at her long, sinuous figure, which suggested Lilith and the medieval conception of an angel as well.
When she lifted her eyes to him and smiled, he realized that it was the first really natural smile that he had encountered in a month.
Something cold within him warmed once more. The feminine then still held that which could affect him. His heart, after all, was not utterly dead.
He returned the smile, and the slits grew yet more narrow. And as they had seemed to young Andrews, on a night at Simla, and to Heaven only knows how many other men at Heaven only knows how many other places, so they seemed to him—cleft opals, with the devil splitting the hairs of the lashes that kept them from scorching a mere masculine mortal.
"I remember you as a little girl," he murmured.
"First blood," said Kneedrock, who had been listening, in a half-whisper to the duke.
"Yes, but you know she'll brace him up," returned his grace. "She really will. My word, but she's very bracing, is Nina. I like her. I always have."
"He'll be very glad to creep back, scratched and minus one ear, and marry his fiancée in six months," rejoined the honorable viscount with bitter cynicism.
"Do you really think so?" asked the duke.