PART I
"If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard ... thou shalt enjoy her."—W. SHAKESPEARE.
CHAPTER I
"Whatever Norah lacked, it was not looks," said Ross, leaving the rail to fling himself into a deck-chair that creaked under his weight.
'Beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart
And a good stomach to a feast are all,
All the poor crimes you can charge her with,'"
he murmured.
"Not that her heart stayed very merry: while, for the matter of that, even her beauty was a good deal altered the last time I met her and heard from her lips the story I am going to tell you.
By then life and Africa had handled her and treated her as an etcher his plate with steel and acid, adding something which was not there before, call it a soul or a complex according to your creed.
Well, if from heaven that day you could have seen her clearly as she sat beside Dick Ward on the deck of the Mimi you would have remarked, a bit of a thing, who rode some seven stone, neatly cut as a Chinese carving, legs and ankles to make you praise the name of short skirts, short dark hair that entangled the gleam of shaded lamplight on mahogany, cheekbones curving out from cheeks, whose blood (unless that carmine could be claimed for lip salve) had ebbed to her mouth, on which a smile mocked more often than it flattered.
This smile, her pretty slimness, her moods, mobile as quicksilver, might have left her what old men call 'a divine imp,' and you could have forgotten her in the next pretty girl you saw, but for some subtle, elusive quality—like a barely perceptible perfume—that, troubling and tantalising, forbade oblivion."