He broke off to fish an object out of his watch pocket. This was a small chamois bag, and out of it he took something that pulsed with incredible fires. He handed it to the Saint.
“That’s Dawn.”
The circular fire opal blazed with living beauty — blue, green, gold, cerise, chartreuse — and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder as he looked at the cameo head carved on the unbelievable gem.
There is beauty to which one can put a name. There is beauty that inspires awe, bravery, fear, lust, greed, passion. There is beauty that softens the savage blows of fate. There is beauty that drives to high adventure, to violence.
That stone, and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface, was beauty beyond belief. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace again.
She was the lily maid of Astolat, the lost loveliness that all men seek and never find, the nameless desire that haunts the ragged edge of sleep, that curls a lonely smile and sends vacant eyes searching far spaces.
Her face was made for — and of? the Saint asked himself — dreaming.
“Count me in, old boy.”
He went outside. Through the dusky stillness the far-off unseen feet pounded nearer.
The feet were four. The men, with mathematical logic, two. One might be a jockey, the other a weight lifter. They tore out of the forest and confronted the Saint.