Through the open window the setting sun, streaming into her room, would find Betty at work, till Noll should come for her from the studio to take her out. He had tacked prints upon the walls above her desk, and there were books scattered about, and a pleasant picturesqueness held the place.
From the early morning, when she arose blithely, put out her rosy-tipped white feet upon the floor, and got to the warming of the coffee at the cheerful stove and set the place astir with happy industry, making up the wonderful sommier, the bed of the students’ quarter, into a lounge for the day, and the like offices, until the twilight, when Noll came home, and they went out to dine at some cheap place with other students, Horace and the Five Foolish Virgins and the rest, Babette sitting next to her—all was one long delight of living. The mid-day meal at the restaurants had soon had to go; but she was well content enough, for she could make her own coffee, and he is a glutton indeed who is not content with the bread of Paris.
As the sun’s amber light passed from the court and crept up the eastern wall, and the grey shadow of the dusk began to fall, full of chill other shadows, that took their stealthy stand in dark corners, and made a conspiracy of silence at the heels of the dying day, the air was filled with a mystic sense of evensong. For, when shutters were drawn to, by silent hands, and windows one by one were closed, and lamps gleamed yellow through the slats of close-shut jalousies, her lover’s feet would be leaping up the stairs, and in the deepening blue of the heavens a myriad white stars be set aflame.
CHAPTER LI
Wherein it is hinted that it were Best to “Touch not the Catte botte a Glove”
There was in and around and about the lithe beauty of the dark slender young woman, Gabrielle Solignac, much of her own strange uncanny poetry, with its stealthy Eastern manner—catlike when she moved, glowing in colour as a ranging leopard, her clinging draperies loading the air with scent of sandal-wood and the fragrance of Japan—catlike when at rest, and warm-hued and alertly languid as the Indies, her skin now showing saffron as dyed wood, now gleaming white as cunningly wrought ivory. She was mystic always as some half-revealed god in the great shadow of the deep hollows of pagan temples—silent and calm as Egyptian Sphinx.
Her exquisite fame had passed beyond Paris, and was broadcast over Europe; yet she was little more than girl....
She had been married to Myre a month; and as she now lay on her side at full length along the great Eastern lounge, her dark head on her father’s knees where he sat at the end of the lounge, there was something of leopard grace in her attitude; and in the long half-closed green eyes, something of leopard’s latent fire.