"The hazard—the chances you are to take—"
But she laughed deliciously, and sealed his mouth
with her fragrant hand, bidding him hunt for other sources of worry if he really was bent on scaring himself.
Later she asked him for a calendar, and he brought it, and together they looked over it where several of the last days of May had been marked with a pencil.
As she sat beside him, studying the printed sequence of the days, a smile hovering on her lips, he thought he had never seen her so beautiful.
A soft wind blew the bright tendrils of her hair across her cheeks; her skin was like a little girl's, rose and snow, smooth as a child's; her eyes clearly, darkly blue—the hue and tint called azure—like the colour of the zenith on some still June day.
And through the glow of her superb and youthful symmetry, ever, it seemed to him, some inward radiance pulsated, burning in her golden burnished hair, in scarlet on her lips, making lovely the soft splendour of her eyes. Hers was the fresh, sweet beauty of ardent youth and spring incarnate,—neither frail and colourlessly spiritual, nor tainted with the stain of clay.
Sometimes Athalie lunched there in the garden with him, Hafiz, seated on the bench beside them, politely observant, condescending to receive a morsel now and then.
It was on such a day, at noon-tide, that Athalie bent over toward him, touched his hair with her lips, then whispered something very low.