Whether or no he chose he was not sure.
She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to seek love from her he did not care.
And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.
There was so little passion left in him.
He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so, he had taught himself to desire it; and yet——
As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a yellowhammer.
Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the interior was visible. It was very poor—a floor of mud, a couch of rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple as herself.
In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks, he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslàn glanced at them as he passed.
"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a woman's lips."
Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled suddenly, and walked on in silence.