'My mother bids me dye my hair the fashionable hue.'
When Chris had seen his subordinate safe to bed, he made free with the bit of candle-end for his own use.
And by its light he saw his letter to Jack Raymond lying forgotten on the floor in a half-dried pool of ink.
'I cannot send that one, anyhow,' he said to himself as he tore it up. But he felt as if he could send nothing--that he could never give another thought to such things. For Naraini had needed comfort, and he had given it to her. But he could not even think of her; a profound physical content lulled him to a dreamless sleep, his last thought, ere that sleep claimed him, being that he had not felt so happy for years.
[CHAPTER XX]
THE OLD WINE
Chris woke suddenly, and yet without that sense of dislocation which such awakening often brings with it.
The vast content that had been his in falling asleep was his still, as with eyes which seemed to him to have grown clear of dreams he lay smiling at what he saw, though that was only a wide, empty, whitewashed room with many window-doors set open to the dawn; and through these, nothing but a strip of mud roof; and beyond that again, the broad blades of the plantain leaves shining grey-green in the grey light. A slight breeze swayed them, and rustled in the frayed straws of the rude matting with which the floor was covered.
But that louder, more intermittent rustle was not the wind. It was the patter of a bird's feet. And there, with tail erect on the coping, clear against the glistening grey-green leaves, which swayed like sea-weeds in a swift tide, a striped squirrel was breakfasting on some treasure-trove.
Chris filled his lungs with a long 'breath. He was back in the old world; the world where all living things are alike mortal, where even man is as the flower that fadeth, the beast that perisheth.