“In your eyes, dearest!” he replied, smiling into them. “In your eyes that open right back into a soul that knows immemorial secrets and knows them all as love!”
She felt quietly for his hand and held it, without a word, through moments where speech was profanation.
Then, with a long breath, feminine curiosity awaking in her, she turned her head and glanced once more around the room.
“It’s charming, Jim!” she asserted. “I didn’t know you had so much taste. Where did you get all these beautiful things?” She left the fireside, began to roam about the room, peering into cabinets, picking up one precious object after another, turning over the pages of the books that lay upon the tables.
He watched her lithe, graceful movements with admiration.
“All over the place,” he answered, negligently. “China, Japan—a few in Italy——”
“And this?” she asked, holding up a large crystal ball, supported in a lotus cup upon the back of a carved ivory elephant studded with amber and turquoise and coral, its feet upon an ivory tortoise. “What is this?”
“Oh—that! I got that in India. Some old crystal-gazer’s outfit. It’s a few hundred years old—symbolizes the universe, you know. The world rests upon an elephant and the elephant upon a tortoise. I don’t know what the tortoise stands on——”
Her face was bright with interest.
“And have you ever looked into it?”