She hesitated, her fingers to her lips, and reluctantly unwound the braids that she wore about her forehead in a Swedish coil. Then, with deft fingers, she shook them loose while the man came suddenly close to her, his eyes studying her face in surprise. The long black hair, released, fell about her shoulders and softened the marble coldness of her features, fell in black rippling waves like the mysterious depths of the sea on a summer’s night. She seemed like a released soul, something soaring and on the wing, far-distant as the wild fjords of her native Scandinavia.
“Is this better?” she asked, smiling with a new archness as though within her too a spirit had been released.
He was too startled by her sudden loveliness, to answer. All at once he came to her and held her head between his hands, gazing into the dark face where the blue-gray eyes shone forth with an easy light.
“Inga,” he said tempestuously, looking at her so intensely that, for the first time, she dropped her glance, “What are you? Where do you come from? What is behind those eyes of yours? Do you really care for me, or is it just an instinct in you to help? Sometimes I think that’s all, that if I were not in such need of you, you would disappear in the night like the elfin thing you are.”
“You are wrong,” she said, shaking her head.
He laughed and turned away.
“Put up your hair. I’ll paint you like that—but some other day.”
When she had braided and coiled her hair about her forehead and come to his side, he took her hand and raised it to his lips, in more genuine emotion than he had shown.
“Inga, you’re much too good for me with my cranky ways, my bad temper and worse. If I’m rough—I’m always sorry for it.”