Following his glance, she saw that she held some fragments of leaf in her hand. It was her wanton habit, while she walked and brooded, to pull leaves from hedge or bush and tear them abstractedly to bits along their network of veins. It was an easy matter to follow the trail of destruction.
"I said I wanted to go alone."
"Sure. And you can go alone. I'm quite happy as we were before you stopped. It's a treat to watch the way you walk."
Disdaining to walk any further as an exhibition for his applause, she lay down to rest in a field ablaze with some pungent yellow weed.
Instantly he had flung himself down at her side, and kissed her—and kissed her—as she flamed to sudden haggard beauty. Kissed her.... Grace, once fascinated by his very difference to the Anglo-Saxon, had for several months gently trickled cold water upon his outbursts of love; his pride smouldered ... till now it avenged itself upon the woman with brilliant eyes, and black heavy hair, and supple body pressing down the gay hot-scented weeds——This woman could never taunt him with the dark thick blood that flowed in his veins, because of the streak in her own that matched it....
"You—squaw ... didn't you feel that this had to happen, the second ever you set eyes on me...?"
Over-ripe, she needed only the touch.
... Sun steaming at high noon upon its yellow valley—his voice like molten gold—his kisses fire on her throat——Was there at last sufficient heat in the whole chilled world? She absorbed it; sucked it into her craving system; gave it out again in great torrid gushes. Napier was startled into fervour keener than he had meant to display in what was three parts a mere vicious back-fling at Gracie's charming lazy indifference. Somewhere deep down in the recesses of his nature, he registered a prudent hope that Temple knew how to look after his wife, and would not allow the thing to go too far....
Teddy brought Miss Cissy Norris in to lunch at Rapparee House, by Trixie's special permission. As Napier and Kathleen strolled out to the table laid by way of a change in the centre of the vegetable garden, the former heard old Mrs. Kirby state with remarkable affability:
"Biss Dorris—you are positively the odly persod who cad brig a sbile to our Teddy's lips!"...