lace. Finally he found her; or, rather, she slipped
illusively into his contracted field of vision.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," she reproached
him.

She wore a red dress, purple in the night, with a
narrow, black velvet ribband pinned about her
throat; her straw hat was bound in red. She gained
an extraordinary potency from the dark; it almost
seemed to Gordon Makimmon that her skin had a
luminous quality; he could see her pointed hands
distinctly, and her small, cold face. All her dresses
strained about her provocative body, an emphasis
rather than a covering of her slim maturity. They
drifted, without further speech, out of the circles of
wavering light, into the obscurity beyond.

They sat, resting against a hillock of sod, facing
the sinking visible rim of the moon. From the bog
the frogs sounded like a continuously and lightly-struck
xylophone. Meta Beggs shivered.

"I'll go mad here," she declared, "in this -- this
nothingness. Look -- the moon dropping into wilderness;
other lucky people are watching it disappear
behind great houses and gardens; women in the
arms of their lovers are watching it through silk
curtains."

He gazed critically over the valley, the mountains,
into the sky scarfed by night. "I'm used to
it," he returned; "it doesn't bother me like it does

[[245]]

p244 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p245w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p246

v?