“Tell me you will not go away again.”
The Breton did not answer.
“Tell me,” she whispered, moving closer so that their robes touched and she felt him tremble.
Through the open windows came the grumble of the surrounding city. All else was still; the birds in the cages above them and the birds in the park without. Man was yet in the midst of his toil and Nature still somnolent in the afternoon heat.
“Promise me?” She lifted her clasped hands and rested them lightly on his bosom.
The thrushes in the bamboo cages above them began to flutter, and in the park the calling of pheasants was heard. With the breath of evening larks, pehlings, birds of a hundred spirits came forth from their hidings. The hum of the city grew less and less.
Neither had moved.
The shadow of the feathery bamboo that grew by the fish-pond without came softly in through the open shell-latticed window; furtively it crept across the floor, slowly it ascended the lacquered wall and—vanished.
After a while the sun’s rays were gone and a yellow light diffused through the room, burnished anew its golden fretwork. An orange-saffron glimmer lingered for a few moments, then came the fleeting rose blush of twilight, caressingly tinging the paled faces of the Breton and the wife standing so still and so silent in its parting light.
Gently as silken floss is wafted upward by a breath so the little hands of the wife stole from the Breton’s bosom to his shoulders.