With her arms crossed on her lap, she was staring at a near-by shrub. It was a starved old rose-bush which had long since ceased to bear, but she seemed to see in it a vision, for a smile unclosed her lips and narrowed her eyes. She looked up at him and her bosom lifted.
"Yes," she repeated softly, "I should like mightily to see the sphinx."
He was regarding her with a strange, fixed attention. Now he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket with a convulsive movement.
"You're something by way of being a sphinx yourself," he said unsteadily.
Reaching behind her she slowly drew up the shawl until straight folds of the material fell about her face. Then she extended a hand on either knee and gazed before her. The imitation was admirable. Not a feature or limb stirred. The sun penetrated the worn silken shawl and vaguely defined her round little form. It gilded her forehead and chin and traced a line of humid light along the lids of the eyes the pupils of which were so obstinately contemplating Eternity. But what that celestial body could not accomplish with its bold steady gaze, was given to a mortal to achieve with a single glance. St. Ives bent over her.
The sphinx was lost in the woman.
Throbbing with delicious dread, Rachel gave him her eyes. She returned look for look, while her breathing ceased and her little hands, still stretched along her knees, trembled. Lower and lower he bent his head, higher and higher she lifted hers, to the length of its delicate, palpitating throat. At the very brink—an ecstatic, troubled, reeling pause, then—their lids sank, their lips met.
About them the insects continued their aggressive activity. A bee, greedy for the last drop of honey, lit on a purple aster and the whole light spray of blossoms swayed to his weight. The butterfly that had lately visited Rachel's hand, joined its mate high up in the thin blue air. From the branch of a sapling the thrush swelled its throat once more in a joyful song. Ignorant that those two motionless heads announced creatures differing in aught from themselves, the host of creeping and winged things enrolled them for the nonce in their lists.
Rachel was the first to recoil from the caress. She drew back,—sweetly ashamed, shyly-radiant, with that in her eyes a man would have died rather than lessen.
But on Emil the shock of the caress had a contrary effect.