“Margaret! Ardee, dear! Look at me!”
Her eyes flowed into his. From a blur under cloud-pale eyelids, they had turned to violet balls, shot through with a trembling light. The look she gave him melted over him in a rage of love. Desire bordered it, a smile dipped in it, promise made it golden, and he saw his own longing painted in it as a pilgrim sees his reflection in a slumbering pool.
She clasped her hands on his head, pushing back his cloth cap, and framing his face in the long, sweeping oval of her arms. He could feel little vibrant thrills in her fingers. He held her tightly, masterfully, first at arm’s length, laughing into her wide eyes, and then close, folding her, pressing her hair with his hands.
The leaves from the roses she wore fell in splotches of deep red, sprinkling the brown-veined sand at their feet; the dense, bruised odor, mixed with the salty breath of seaweed, seemed to fill and choke all her swaying senses.
“It is like a storm!” she said. “I have dreamed of it coming at the last gently, like a bright morning, but it isn’t like that! It seemed as if that were the way it would come to me—like a still, small voice—but it isn’t! It’s the wind and the earthquake and the fire! Oh!” she said, drawing her breath in a long, shuddering inhalation. “Do you smell that rose-scent? Did ever any roses smell like that? They—they make me dizzy! Feel me tremble.”
Every pulsation of her frame ran through him with a swift, delicious sensation, like the touching of rough velvet. Her curling hair, where it sprang against his neck, ridged his skin with a creeping delight.
“Do you know,” he said, “you are like a great, tall, yellow lily. Some gnome has drawn amber streaks in your hair—it shines like a gold-stone—and rubbed your cheeks with a pink tulip leaf! And your lips are like—no, they are like nothing but ripe strawberries! Nobody could ever describe your eyes; they are most like a bed of purple violets set in a brown cloud with the sun shining through it. Tell me!” he said suddenly. “Do you love me? Do you? Do you?”
“Yes! yes! yes! Oh,” she breathed, “what is there in your hands? I want them to touch me!”
He passed his palms lightly along the bow-like curve of her cheek.
“It is like fire and flowers and music,” she said, “all rolled into one. And those roses! They are attar. The sand looks as if it were bleeding!”