Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.
Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested that she could not keep her eyelids open.
“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”
She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before he could retaliate. He walked up and down alone a while, breathing the incense of her possession in the quiet air, still faintly flavored with the perfume she employed.
Then he went in and up the dark stairs to find her. She lay asleep along the bed as if she had been flung there. She was lying across the border of the candle’s yellow feud with the blue moonlight; they divided her form between dim gold and faint azure. She had fallen aslumber where she fell, and he stole close to wonder over her and to study her unblushing beauty.
Her face was out of the reach of the candle’s flickering gleam, and the moon bewitched it with a mist of sapphire. Through the open window a soft breeze loitered, fingering her curls, lifting them from her snowy neck and letting them fall. And from the tulip tree a long, low branch, studded with empty sconces of living brass, beat upon the pane with muffled strokes.
“Beautiful! beautiful!” he whispered—not to her, nor to himself, but to a something that seemed to watch with him. He longed to be worthy of such beauty, and wondered if she—the she inside that little bosom—were worthy of such treasures, such perils, as her face and her fascinations.
His heart ached with a yearning to shelter her from the evil of the world, the plagues that would rend that lacy fabric, the fiends that would soil its cleanliness. Such a petulant, froward, reckless little imp it was that dwelt inside the alabaster shrine! Such loyalty she had for the gaudy city and its frivolities! Such terror of the pestilence, yet such terror of the great, sweet loneliness of this beloved solitude!
Else, why had she stared back along the road with a sorrow, with a regret that seemed to trail almost like a ribbon reaching all the way to town? Would she ever be divorced from the interests that he could neither understand nor admire?
Well, she was his for a while—for now—and more his own while she slept than while she was awake, for when she was awake her eyes kept studying the plain, dull walls, and his plain, dull self; wondering, no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the dances and picnics and romances that crowded the days and nights in the city.