In the heavy heat the low tile roof looked cool and inviting. Tall soft-eyed iris were standing in its garden overlooking the water, and against the green their velvety leaves made vivid splashes of golden blue. On a dead tree two black crows were quarreling and cherry-petals powdered the paths like pink hail. The haze, sifting from the sky, seemed to wrap everything in a vast, shimmering veil. At the hedge he paused an instant. Some one, somewhere, was humming, low-voiced, an air that he had once loved. He pushed open the gate and went on into the tremulous radiance. Then he stopped short.
Barbara was seated above him in the fork of a low camelia tree, one arm laid out along a branch, her green gown blending with a bamboo thicket behind her and her vivid face framed in the blossoms. She sat, chin in hand, looking dreamily out across the bay, and the hummed song had a rhythm that seemed to fit her thought—slow and infinitely tender.
"You!" he cried.
She turned with a startled movement that dissolved into low, delicious laughter.
"Fairly caught," she answered. "I don't often revert far enough to climb trees, but I thought no one but Haru and I was here. Will you come and help me down, Honorable Fly-man?"
"Wait—" he said. "What was the song you were humming?"
She looked at him with a quick intake of breath, then for answer began to sing, in a voice that presently became scarce more than a whisper:
"Forgotten you? Well, if forgetting
Be hearing all the day
Your voice through all the strange babble
Of voices grave, now gay—
If counting each moment with longing
Till the one when I see you again,
If this be forgetting, you're right, dear!
And I have forgotten you then!"
Daunt's hand fell to his side. A young girl's face nested in creamy, pink blossoms—a sweet, shy, flushed face under a mass of curling, gold-bronze hair. "I remember now!" he said in a low voice. "I ... sang it to you ... that day!"
"I am flattered!" she exclaimed. "The day before yesterday you had forgotten that you ever saw poor little me! It was Mrs. Claybourne, of course, that you sang to! Yet you were my idol for a long month and a day!"