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In the dream were Nile cities, with crowding houses whose walls were heightened by tier upon tier of rose-and-white pots, moulded in with honey-coloured mud. There were stretches of sandy shore, and green gloom of palm groves. There were domed tombs of saints, glittering like snow-palaces in the sun. There were great golden mounds inlaid with strips of paler gold picked out with ebony.
The excitement of the moment added a deeper color to her always splendid rose-and-white complexion, upon which the steam-laden atmosphere distilled perpetually that soft dewiness characteristic of the perfect complexion of young children or of goddesses. And like a goddess the queen appeared that moment, an untidy, earth-chained goddess, mirthful, voluptuous.
Oh, but it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully still, that rose-and-white room at Norah's! No street cars to tear at one's nerves with grinding brakes and clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet on the concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking midnight joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which make night hideous in the city.
Ena was more than a lady. She was an orchid, a princess. She ruled father with her little finger a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young. There was so much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words.
She plucked an oleander from one of the tall marble urns set along the balustrade, and pressed the pink blossom against her face, and, closing her eyes, breathed in its perfume; then, absent-minded, she let it drop, over the terrace, upon the path below. "It's impossible," she said suddenly, aloud. At last she went into the house, and up to her rose-and-white retiring-room.
She merely added, "Please hurry things I hate being a prisoner," and sealed and addressed it with a flourish to William B. Hill, and sent it off by the maid, and felt oddly comforted by the memory of Billy's vigorous chin. The heat of the rose-and-white room was stifling now as the slant sun of afternoon burned through the closed blinds and drawn hangings.
She felt vaguely sorry for these girls; but she realized nothing of their life. Nor did she associate funerals and illness with herself. As the convolvulus stands in apparent changelessness in a silent rose-and-white eternity, so she seemed to herself a stationary being.
Nature had indulged in one of her freaks in the production of Eulalia, a maiden of fifteen summers, the only surviving child of Mr. and Mrs. King. She inherited her mother's tall, flexile form, and her long dark eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair; but she had her father's large blue eyes, and his rose-and-white complexion.
Bellegarde had to agree; and Henri fell in love at sight with the golden hair, blue eyes, and rose-and-white skin of "Gaby." She preferred Bellegarde to the long-nosed king; but the Béarnais was never one to take "no" for an answer. He went from Compiègne again and again to the forbidden castle, in peril of his life from Guise and the League.
It had become more or less their living-room since Innocent's departure, for Robin could not bear to sit in the "best parlour," as it was called, now that there was no one to share its old-world charm and comfort with him, and when Priscilla's work was done, and everything was cleared and the other servants gone to their beds, he preferred to bring his book and pipe into the kitchen, and sit in an old cushioned arm-chair on one side of the fire- place, while Priscilla sat on the other, mending the house-linen, both of them talking at intervals of the past, and of the happy and unthinking days when Farmer Jocelyn had been alive and well, and when Innocent was like a fairy child flitting over the meadows with her light and joyous movements, her brown-gold hair flying loose like a trail of sunbeams on the wind, her face blossoming into rose-and-white loveliness as a flower blossoms on its slender stem, her voice carrying sweet cadences through the air and making music wherever it rang.
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