His presentation as a celebrity had focused attention upon him in a manner momentarily embarrassing. He found a subtle pleasure in the thought that it had not called this girl’s eyes from whatever occupied them out beyond the palings. Saxon disliked the ordinary. His canvases and his enthusiasms were alike those of the individualist.
“Duska,” laughed Miss Buford, “come back from your dreams, and be introduced to Mr. Saxon.”
The painter acknowledged a moment of suspense. What would be her attitude when she recognized the man who had stared at her down by the paddock fence?
The girl turned. Except himself, no one saw the momentary flash of amused surprise in her eyes, the quick change from grave blue to flashing violet and back again to grave blue. To the man, the swiftly shifting light of it seemed to say: “You are at my mercy; whatever liberality you receive is at the gift and pleasure of my generosity.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said simply, extending her hand. “I was just thinking—” she paused to laugh frankly, and it was the music of the laugh that most impressed Saxon—“I hardly know what I was thinking.”
He dropped with a sense of privileged good-fortune into the vacant chair at her side.
With just a hint of mischief riffling her eyes, but utter artlessness in her voice, she regarded him questioningly.
“I wonder if we have not met somewhere before? It seems to me——”
“Often,” he asserted. “I think it was in Babylon first, perhaps. And you were a girl in Macedon when I was a spearman in the army of Alexander.”
She sat as reflective and grave as though she were searching her recollections of Babylon and Macedon for a chance acquaintance, but under the gravity was a repressed sparkle of mischievous delight.