She laughed, slowly twirling her foot, as though fascinated by its suppleness, or by the gleaming creases of the silk that covered it. Then, with a little jerk of her knee, she let it settle again into the froth of flounces.
"Really," she said, "for a man who says so little, you do say the strangest things."
His eyes had wandered again to the square of open air, the picture in azure and ochre and emerald which the window made in the wall. The brown woman still sat swinging her bead in the shade of the chenar. Terrington could see its glassy blueness as it dipped to and fro across a splinter of sunlight.
Rose Chantry, with her eyes on his profile, asked him at what he was looking.
He told her.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "Why is she always doing that?"
"She wants a child," he said.
"But she has one."
"Another then."
She gave a shudder.