And she knew the thought of their separation was latent in both their minds, and at last she was sad.
She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fireglow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her.
"Flowers stops out of doors all weathers," he said. "They have no houses."
"Not even a hut!" she murmured.
With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mount of Venus.
"There!" he said. "There's forget-me-nots in the right place!"
She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body.
"Doesn't it look pretty!" she said.
"Pretty as life," he replied.
And he stuck a pink campion bud among the hair.
"There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the bulrushes."
"You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?" she asked wistfully, looking up into his face.
But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite blank.
"You do as you wish," he said.
And he spoke in good English.
"But I won't go if you don't wish it," she said, clinging to him.
There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire. The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said nothing.
"Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford. I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to—" she resumed.
"To let them think a few lies," he said.
"Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?"
"I don't care what they think."
