In the pale-lemon flame of an oil reading-lamp, the room showed shadow-streaked, but the air was saturated with the sweet heavy scent of some freshly-plucked flower.
He took the lantern from her hand and lifted it high, flinging its rays across the bed.
His pillow and counterpane were invisible for a mass of starry blooms whose warm sweetness petalled this prepared fairy couch. Ferlie caught her breath, uncertain whether she most wanted to laugh or to cry. True to her immortal tendency to snatch beauty from every corner of the world, however close it lurked, she said swiftly, "Cyprian, it's pretty! It's so pretty. Look just at the prettiness of it. But oh ... if only it had not been ... inevitable!"
He answered, simply enough, without facing her,
"I guessed you'd say that. I never dreamed of this. I never do seem to foresee things. But, however you look at it, she must go."
It was not then that they discovered she had already gone.
* * * * * *
She was taken out of the river very early in the morning when a silver film of dew veiled the rushes and new buds were blossoming to life upon the soaking trees. Flame-of-the-forest reared its scorching beauty above her when they laid her limp upon the shore; her bright draperies draggled, and the once shining coil of her hair hanging in a tangled shroud over her breast.
And so Cyprian saw her when summoned to identify her as his "servant." Well and truly had she served a Master more crushingly exacting than he.
In the haunted days—and nights—which followed for him, Cyprian felt that, but for Ferlie's gentle patience and sense of vision, he might easily have lost his reason.