At least, it was meant to pass over; but when he saw her clearly his hand stopped, and he could no more have kept it moving for a moment than a conscientious bee could have kept flying past a freshly opened flower.
She had long-bobbed blue-black hair that shone like burnished metal, and long-lashed eyes that looked the same color. Her face was a perfect oval of softly-modeled olive, ripening into moist lips that were in themselves a justification for at least half the poems that have been written on such subjects. She was the kind of thing that a castaway on a desert island would dream about just before the seagulls started talking back to him.
The Saint should have had his mind on nothing but the job in hand; but he was still a long way from such dizzy depths of asceticism. She was so much more what a woman out of the wide world should have been, so completely everything that Titania Ourley was not, that he didn't even realize how long he looked at her before she gave him a hint of it.
"Are you quite through?" she said icily; and yet even then her voice matched the picture of her so much better than the mood that the rebuke was warmer than most other women's welcomes.
The Saint turned his light downwards so that it wasn't directly in her eyes, and she could see him equally by the reflected glow; but he didn't turn away himself.
He said, in a low reckless breath:
"Barbara the Beautiful
Had praise of lute and pen;
Her hair was like a summer night,
Dark, and desired of men…"