She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut, that revealed with unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender shape. A knot of white and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at her breast; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was bewilderingly lovely.
She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and threw it down, and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, and looked across at the man who was her husband, smiling faintly as she held her little foot, delicately shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.
"Do I interfere with your work? Are any patients waiting?"
"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with a smile. "And if anyone were waiting, you are an older client, and have the prior claim."
"We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the bell, adding: "I am fond of this room."
It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came across to the hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, and stood at the opposite side of it, leaning an arm upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above it reflected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and the profile of a face that was haggard and worn.
The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, shutting out that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had been staring. As Lynette busied herself with the shining silver and delicate Japanese porcelain, there was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book of her face—a locked book to Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp.
Ah, what a face it was! It fascinated and held him. Such long, thick, shadowy eyelashes, sweeping the white cheeks! Such a low, wide, perfectly modelled forehead above them, with fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the richly rippling, parted hair that was coiled and twisted and roped into a mass behind the small, delicate ears, as though its owner were impatient of its luxuriance. Such a close-folded, mysterious mouth, with deep-cut curves, hiding the pure white, rather overlapping teeth. An irregular nose, rather square-ended, with eager nostrils; a rounded chin, with a little cleft in it, went to the making of the face that Saxham and many others thought so beautiful.
Only something was wanting to it. "Animation," the physiognomist would have said. "Vitality, mobility." "Health," might have thought the ordinary observer, mistaking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of debility.
But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes, so often hidden by the thick white eyelids, with their deep fringe of black-brown lashes, said to himself with bitterness: "She is quite well. Nothing on earth is wrong with her, except that she is not happy! I can give her everything else on earth, it seems, but what she needs most of all!"