“Dr. Traherne is quite an astronomer,” Lucilla told the Raja.
“As much at home with the telescope as with the microscope, eh?”
“Oh, no,” Traherne told him, “I’m no astronomer. I can pick out a few of the constellations,—that’s all.”
“For my part,” the Raja declared, “I look at the stars as little as possible. As a spectacle they’re monotonous, and they don’t bear thinking of. Ah, here it is!” He took the shawl the woman had brought, and placed it delicately about Mrs. Crespin’s shoulders.
“What an exquisite shawl!” she exclaimed, drawing an end of it through her fingers.
No self-respecting trousseau in affluent Christendom would have thought of lacking its “Indian shawl” fifty years ago, and one winter—just thirty-seven years ago to be exact (even at the risk of owning to old-age well reached) every well-dressed woman in Chicago had one of the costly things hacked up into cloaks and dolmans. And beautiful some of those “Indian shawls” were—and (more to their advertised point) probably most of them had been made in India. But this was a shawl not as those. It was warmer, softer and incomparably more thin. From the burning Indian red of its silky, sheeny center every color on the Asian palette blended and blurred into and accentuated all the others, and so did half a score of Oriental motifs—turquoise-blue, apple-green, orange and emerald touched milk-white and velvet-black, crimson, rose, ruby and scarlet, rippled like the notes of a scale masterly played, and the half-hinted motifs that patterned it as indescribably as the fallen snow patterns the panes it frosts in the Canadian midwinter, and the beautiful curves of the “pineapple” and “palm-leaf” ran through them all like its theme through a poem.
“It is the most beautiful made-thing I have ever seen,” Mrs. Crespin said.
“And most becoming.” Rukh smiled into her eyes as he spoke, his look not quite as light as his words. “Don’t you think so, Doctor?” he added a shade quizzically, for Traherne was gazing fixedly at Mrs. Crespin, with a look too in his eyes. He flushed at the Raja’s words and shifted his glance without answering; Rukh laughed softly, and let it pass.
“My Mistress of the Robes has chosen well!” He motioned his beautiful, slim hands in noiseless applause to the ayah, who grinned, and went, as she’d come, not making a sound.
“Why won’t the stars bear thinking of, Raja?” Lucilla asked.