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The little scrupulous ablutions finished, she dried her face on the fine cambric of the under-sleeve, she dried her little ears, her brightening eyes, the pink palms of her hand, and every polished finger separately from the delicate flushed tip to the wrist, blue-veined and slender. She shook out her heavy hair, heavy and gleaming with burnished threads, and bound it tighter.
The pale young man moved a little in his chair, and the girl laid her hand caressingly upon his blue-veined one.
But ere my hand reached it, another hand, from the opposite side of the table, appeared upon it an old, blue-veined, but powerful hand. I looked up. There stood the beloved disciple! His countenance was as a mirror which shone back the face of the Master. Slowly he lifted the book, and turned away.
A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed at first merely slow and languid, were in reality singularly full of decision and purpose. She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly owing to fatigue and mental worry.
But the pen in his trembling hand made queer spidery marks in the ledgers now, and his figure seven was very likely to look like a drunken letter "z." The great bulk of his work was done by the capable, comely Miss Kelly who could juggle figures like a Cinquevalli. His shaking, blue-veined yellow hand was no match for Miss Kelly's cool, firm fingers.
How Gwen would have welcomed a recurrence of the faintest breath, to keep alive her confidence that this was only sleep sleep to be welcomed as the surest herald of life and strength! How she longed to touch the blue-veined wrist upon the coverlid, but once, just for a certainty of a beating pulse, however faint!
Some daughter, perhaps, or granddaughter, who should have been the light of his home instead of I smiled to find how bitter I was growing, and how swiftly I was weaving a romance round an unshaven old man and his correspondence. Yet all day he lingered in my mind, and I had fitful glimpses of those two trembling, blue-veined, knuckly hands with the paper rustling between them.
Up to the crowning masses of her dusky hair where the little serpents' heads darted forth glisteningly, over the dainty curve of her white shoulders and bosom where the symbolic Eye seemed to regard him with a sleepy weirdness, down to the blue-veined, small feet in the silvery sandals, and up again to the red witchery of her mouth and black splendor of those twin fire-jewels that flashed beneath her heavy lashes his gaze wandered hungrily, searchingly, passionately, his heart beat with a loud, impatient eagerness like a wild thing struggling in its cage, but though his lips moved, he said no word, she too was silent.
To young Gourlay there was a curious difference in his mother. She was almost beautiful to-night. Her blue eyes were large and glittering, her ears waxen and delicate, and her brown hair swept low on her blue-veined temples. Above and below her lips there was a narrow margin of the purest white. "Mother," he said anxiously, "you're not ill, are ye? What do ye need so many wee clouts for?"
"The shop was long and narrow and full of wonderful rare, old curios old violins, cameos, and uncut stones. I was allowed to go all over the shop; to open quaint cases, to go upstairs and out upon an old gallery and to lift from their drawers silken crapes, and to find, buried away, whispering sea-shells and crystal bottles, and irregular pieces of blue-veined marble and alabaster.
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