“Oh.” There was an odd little note of relief in the velvet voice that seemed to reproach me for a brute. I was forever forgetting that the ways of ’Toinette Westerleigh were not the ways of Aileen Macleod.
The dying sun flooded the topmost branches of the forest foliage. My eyes came round to the aureole which was their usual magnet.
“When the sun catches it ’tis shot with glints of gold.”
“It is indeed very beautiful.”
“In cloudy weather ’tis a burnished bronze.”
She looked at me in surprise.
“Bronze! Surely you are meaning green?”
“Not I, bronze. Again you might swear it russet.”
“That will be in the autumn when they are turning colour just before the fall.”
“No, that is when you have it neatly snodded and the firelight plays about your head.”