She drooped, all her body lax with sleep, but still he propped her on his bosom. Her mother took up the girl’s flaccid hand in hers and fondled it softly; she did not urge her claim.
“Daria, Daria,” pleaded the lover, “say you will remember.”
She could not answer now except by the turning of her head upon his bosom; color, drained away by the drug, forsook her, the lips were open and a little drawn. He would have gathered her up then, but a motion from the elders stayed him.
“Remember, oh remember,” he called upon her soul, and the soul struggled to reassure him, but it lay too deep under Forgetfulness. With a shudder she seemed almost to cease to breathe. Evarra, stepping softly, lifted the relaxed lids and showed the eyes rolled upward, the pupils widened. She made a sign at which the circle parted and made way for the youth down the green aisles through which he bore her to his house.
VI
IN WHICH I AM UNHAPPY AND MEET A TALL WOMAN IN THE WOOD
When the vines dropped back from Ravenutzi’s hand upon the wall of boughs through which the Ward and her Keepers passed, it was as if the step that carried them out of sight of the Outliers had also carried them out of knowledge. Not an eye that any other eye could discover, nor any inquiring word strayed upon their vanished trail. In the three days before they returned to the Meet, or it was proper to mention them, they would have visited the King’s Desire, and Zirriloë would be informed of everything pertinent to that connection.
During these three days no Outlier concerned himself with their whereabouts lest he should be thought to have some concern about the Treasure. With the exception of Noche, I believe no Outlier had even so much as curiosity about it. It had been so long since any man had seen it, that until Noche’s account of what the cache contained began to be current, I think they had not any clear idea what the Treasure might consist in. It was something that the Far-Folk wanted and the Outliers did not mean they should get. The struggle kept alive in them tribal integrity and the relish for supremacy.
The practice of not speaking of the Treasure during the three days’ absence of the Ward, had taken on a rigidity of custom which Herman and I did not feel ourselves bound to observe. We could talk of the Treasure and of Zirriloë, and we did that same morning.
When the shadows were gathered close under the forest border, and even to our accustomed eyes there was no sign of the Outliers, other than the subdued sense of gladsome life spread on the pleasant air, I found a place I knew. There the creek went close about the roots of the pine between shallow sandy shoals, and there Herman came to talk to me of the Love-Left Ward. As he sat there at my feet pitching stones into the shallows, that effulgence of personality which had streamed from him at the opening of that day, and now suffused his manner with an unaccustomed warmth, lay quite beyond my reach.
Some of the dread with which Daria had met the obliteration of memory and identity, moved me to draw from Herman an assurance that nothing could quite wipe out from him all recollection of the fellowship and the good times we had had together. It began to appear an alarming contingency that I should be turned out at any moment in a strange country to find my way back to life in company with a man I did not know and whose disposition toward me was still to be learned. It would have become Herman to be very nice to me at this juncture, and while I sat feeling blankly for the communicating thread, he began to talk of the Ward.