Coppinger held her in his arms, shook her hair out that it streamed over his arm, and looked into her upturned face. “Indeed you are light, lighter than when I bore you in my arms before; and you are thin and white, and the eyes, how red. You have been crying. What! this spirit, strong as a steel spring, so subdued that it gives way to weeping!”
Judith’s eyes were closed against the strong light from the sky above, and against the sight of his face bent over hers, and the fire glint of his eyes, dark as a thundercloud and as charged with lightnings. And now there was a flashing of fire from them, of love and pride and admiration. The strong man trembled beneath his burden in the vehemence of his emotion. The boiling and paining of his heart within him, as he held the frail child in his arms, and knew she was to be his own, his own wholly, in a short space. It was for the moment to him as though all earth and sea and heaven were dissolved with nebulous chaos, and the only life—the only pulses in the universe—were in him and the little creature he held to his breast. He looked into her face, down on her as Vesuvius must have looked down on lovely, marble, white Pompeii, with its gilded roofs and incense-scented temples, and restrained itself, as long as restrain its molten heart it could, before it poured forth its fires and consumed the pearly city lying in its arms.
He looked at her closed eyelids with the long golden lashes resting on the dark sunken dip beneath, at the delicate mouth drawn as with pain, at the white temples in which slowly throbbed the blue veins, at the profusion of red-gold hair streaming over his arm and almost touching the ground.
She knew that his eyes—on fire—were on her, and she dared not meet them, for there would be a shrinking—from him, no responsive leap of flame from hers.
“Shall I carry you about like this!” he asked. “I could and I would, to the world’s end, and leap with you thence into the unfathomed abyss.”
Her head, leaning back on his arm, with the gold rain falling from it, exposed her long and delicate throat of exquisite purity of tint and beauty of modelling, and as it lay a little tuft of pink tamarisk blossom, brushed off in her lap into his arms, and then caught in the light edging of her dress, at the neck.
“And you come to me of your own will?” he said.
Then Judith slightly turned her head to avoid his eyes, and said, “I have come—it was unavoidable. Let me down, that we may speak together.”
He obeyed with reluctance. Then, standing before him, she bound up and fastened her hair.
“Look!” said he, and threw open his collar. A ribbon was tied about his throat. “Do you see this?” He loosed the band and held it to her. One delicate line of gold ran along the silk, fastened to it by threads at intervals. “Your own hair. The one left with me when you first heard me speak of my heart’s wish, and you disdained me and went your way. You left me that one hair, and that one hair I have kept wound round my neck ever since, and it has seemed to me that I might still have caught my goldfish, my saucy goldfish that swam away from my hook at first.”