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Horton Pen nestled down at the foot of the tall white scars that end the Vale of St. Thomas and are not much unlike Dover Cliffs, hanging over a sea of squares of the green cane, alternating with masses of pimento foliage. Macdonald's wife was an immensely stout, raven-haired, sloe-eyed, talkative body, the most motherly woman I have ever known I suppose because she was childless.
The señorita was already in the doorway, convoying a sloe-eyed maid who bore wine and glasses upon a tray of beaten silver; and the smile of the señorita was disturbing to a degree, brief though it was. Behind the wine came cakes, and the señorita pointed tragically to the silver dish that held them. "Madre mia, those terrible children of Margarita have stolen half the cakes!
Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs men and women and children clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries beyond their lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners men and women and children drifting, eddying each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace the seal of the Shining One the dead-alive; the lost ones!
As to that, Marian had been with my lady ever since the fatal night whereon she was nigh done to death by that masked ruffian. The earl did go himself to fetch her from Mistress Pepper's, and after that she came neither of us saw the sloe-eyed woman any more. So besides us five no one was the wiser.
"He play somew'ere roun'," announced Ikkie, secreting the purloined head-gear and circling away from the forbidden dressing-table. "But where?" I asked, with exceptional sharpness, for my eye had already traversed the most of that shack and had encountered no sign of him. That sloe-eyed breed didn't know just where, and apparently didn't care.
Perhaps Sophie would have been surprised if she could have known the amount of repression Mr. Thompson gradually became compelled to practice when she was with him. That was frequently enough. They were all good to him. From Carr's Indian woman who could, he now learned, speak passable English down to the sloe-eyed youngest Carr of mixed blood, they accepted him as one of themselves.
To the sloe-eyed, deep-bosomed girl who lounged against the door-post to see so fine a company ride by, I gave an order to fetch the taverner. He came with a slouch, a bent back, and humble, timid eyes a very different attitude from that which he had last adopted towards me. "Where is my mule, you rogue?" quoth I. He looked at me askance. "Your mule, magnificent? said he.
And my Lord Gambara sank back into his chair, languishing, the pomander to his nostrils. All laughed, and Messer Cosimo with them, still considering me. But Messer Fifanti's wife had yet to make me known to three others who sat there, beside the little sloe-eyed lady. This last was a cousin of her own Donna Leocadia degli Allogati, whom I saw now for the first and last time.
Item, the leader of a sort of informal salon where girls congregate, read papers, and daringly discuss metaphysical problems and candy a sloe-eyed, black-browed, imperious maiden she. Item, a very small maiden, absolutely without reverence, who can in one swift sentence trample upon and leave gasping half a dozen young men.
A fire was burning low at the room's far end, and over this a girl was stooping, tending something in a stew-pot. She looked round at my advent, and revealed herself for a tall, black-haired, sloe-eyed wench, comely in a rude, brown way, and strong, to judge by the muscular arms which were bared to the elbow. Interest quickened her face at sight of so unusual a patron.
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