The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of
her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very
big--Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little
girl,"--but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form
and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a
heroic size.
She moved forward a step.
"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.
Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a
path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn
to ignore a question.
"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.
She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face
and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
but her expression was serious.
"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the
first I've had, too, since--"
"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.
"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
dreams mean, for a shilling.
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