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Across a broad, rose-marbled terrace garlanded with a golden wealth of orange-trees and odorous oleanders.. ... under a trellis-work covered with magnolias whose half-shut, ivory-tinted buds glistened in the moonlight like large suspended pearls, . . then through a low-roofed stone-corridor, close and dim, lit only by a few flickering oil-lamps placed at far intervals, . . then on they went, till at last, ascending three red granite steps on which were carved some curious hieroglyphs, they plunged into what seemed to be a vast jungle enclosed in some dense tropical forest.
Down in the meadows, where the ponds were, and the shady trees grew, the cows were so hot that they stood up to their knees in the muddy water, chewing their grass with half-shut eyes, and whisking their long tails about to keep the flies at a distance.
"I sha'n't wear it, of course, till after Christmas," said Lady Tressady at last, still looking at it with half-shut covetous eyes. "Isn't it darling the way the lace is put on! Put it away. George! it's the first I've had from him this year." She looked up at him appealingly. He stooped and kissed her. "I am so glad you like it, mother dear. Can't you sleep now?" "Yes, I think so. Good-night.
I shuddered and laid my hand on Miss Althorpe's. But I did not seek to stop the conversation, for as our looks met, the sick woman fell back and lapsed, or seemed to lapse, into immediate insensibility again. "Is Miss Oliver worse?" inquired Miss Althorpe. I rose and went to the bedside, renewed the bandages on my patient's head, and forced a drop or two of medicine between her half-shut lips.
He was lying back in a big easy-chair and sending out ring after ring of blue smoke, which he watched, as they disappeared, with half-shut eyes. One would have fancied him the embodiment of happy laziness, unless one had chanced to notice the tension of the fingers which grasped an arm of the chair. "What will happen when she does come in?" "Oh, trouble for me, and nothing to show for it."
He was bad all time since he was a baby, an' I t'ink him pretty lucky to die on his bed, an' get absolve, and go to purgatore. If he not have luck like dat he go to hell, an' stay there." He sighed, and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes half-shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs lax with fatigue.
And, slow breathing, with half-shut eyes above his cigar, would he speak of great men living, and journals, long dead, founded in their riotous youth; of years when all the planets were little new-lit stars trying to find their places in the uncaring void, and he, the Head, knew them as young men know one another.
The warm air trembled, and yellow butterflies fluttered up and down in couples. Paul leaned back in the cushions, and gazed with half-shut eyes at this profusion of charming sights. "Are you happy?" asked Elsbeth, leaning towards him. "I don't know," he answered; "it is too much for me." She smiled; she well understood him.
Now it was as though, in watching that aerial weaving and interweaving, he were assisting at a religious rite. He liked it best when the white day-moon was afloat. If he half-shut his eyes, it seemed to him that she and the moon made twin crescents of foaming silver, twin bubbles of white fire, twin films of fairy gossamer, twin vials that held the very essence of poetry.
Her hair was down, tumbling in a shining mass over her shoulders, her eyes were like stars, her cheeks rose-red. She was turning her white neck from side to side, throwing her head backward, looking at herself through half-shut eyes; her mouth was scarlet. "Blair is in love with me!" she said to herself. She felt his last kiss still on her mouth; she felt it until it seemed as if her lip bled.
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