Anna Lombard | Page 4

she laughs and is just as gay as the rest of us, but she can be serious, oh, just too dreadful for anything, and she says there's a great deal in life, and you can get a great deal out of it if you choose, and oh! funny things like that. I don't see much in life not much that's nice, I mean excepting dancing and ices. Could you get me an ice now, do you think, Mr. Ethridge? I really should like one. Take me out on the terrace and then bring me one, will you?"
I took her out on the terrace, found her a chair and then dutifully brought her the ice and sat beside her. The glory of the night had not changed since I sat there alone, only, as it were, deepened and grown richer; the purple sky above was throbbing, beating, palpitating with the light of stars and planets, and a low, large, mellow moon was sinking towards the horizon, reddening as it sunk. What a night for the registration or the consummation of vows! One of those true voluptuous nights when the soft, hot air itself seems to breathe of the passions.
It was a night on which, as the Frenchman said, all women wish to be loved. I glanced at the girl beside me and wondered if she were moved by it, but I thought not; she sat sipping her ice cheerfully and diligently for ice, like virtue, does not last long in the tropics and watching sharply the groups and couples that passed across the lawn and through the trees before us.
"I'm engaged for the next dance, so you'd better take me back to the room," she said, as she set down the empty ^lass at last, with a sigh, on the stone. "And I'll introduce you to Anna, if you like," she added, good-naturedly, "and you'll see what you think of her. Some men seem to like her awfully, and others can't get on with her a bit."
She rose and shook out the folds of her immaculate silk and muslin, and we went back to the ball-room.
The figure in white was still seated, calm and motionless, on the fauteuil, and remained so as we approached. I looked at her hard and critically as we came up. She had a tall, strong, beautiful figure and a face that was like an English summer day. Her hair was fair and clustered thickly round her head in its own curls and waves. It was parted in the middle, and was so thick that it rose on each side of the parting as hair is made to do in sculptured heads, and it had the same waving creases in it, a few short, tiny locks came down on the soft, white forehead, and at the back it fell in a doubled-up plait on her neck; her eyes were blue, like pieces cut from a summer's sky, and her skin like the wild rose in the English hedgerow first opening after a summer shower.
Such was Anna Lombard as I first saw her at the age of twenty-one.
"Anna," said the girl with me, as we stopped beside the fauteuil? "Mr. Ethridge wants me to introduce him to you. Mr. Ethridge Miss Lombard."
The girl addressed looked up and smiled, and I was surprised at the effect of the smile on the face; the red lips parted and showed, slightly, perfect white teeth between, and the eyes flashed and seemed to deepen in color and light up with curious fire.
"I am delighted to make your acquaintance," she said in the conventional manner, and moved just very slightly to one side of the fauteuil, which was large, to indicate I might sit down by her, which I did.
"Now you can amuse yourselves," said Anna's friend, lightly, as her partner made his way up to her to claim her. "Good-by," and she whirled away at the first bar of the new waltz.
It is difficult to say what we talked of or what it was lent "such an irresistible charm to that conversation, but looking back, I think it was partly the great interest and animation with which the girl both talked and listened. Her lace was brilliant, with her deep blue eyes darkening and flashing, and her milky, stainless teeth sparkling through her crimson lips as she laughed. Everything was new and Iresh to her in this wonderful India of ours, and life itself was just dawning in all its beauty before her mental vision. Ber childhood had been passed in the hardest study and closest intellectual training in a dull, fog-laden old town urn the Cornish coast. There, she told me, she had walked on the sea-beaten sands repeating her lessons in the classics to the wild, wet winds that were