im,--another
with gaunt, haggard face and calculating eyes that took in every move of
his pawns in the game to which he had set them. With his father's
words, in which he had read the hint, clear in his mind, Marius stood
looking long at the sleeping girl. Patrician she was from the crown of
her dusky head to the tip of her jewelled sandal. Fair she was,--and his
breath came shorter as his gaze wandered unchecked over her,--eminently
desirable, and yet--He found himself confronted by the unavoidable fact
of her affliction. A man might well hesitate in face of all that it
could mean. One could not tell--that was the trouble. He realized, all
at once, that her eyes were open, and that she was looking at him,
without speech or motion. He drew back, with a certain wholly
unconscious veiling of expression, and spoke.

"You sent for me, Lady Varia?"

She raised herself on an elbow, pushing the hair out of her eyes to look
up at him. With the motion, the jewelled fibula which held her tunic at
the shoulder became unfastened, letting the drapery slip lower over
snowy neck and arm. He noticed that if she saw this, she made no effort
to replace it.

"Sent for you? Not I!" she said, and tapped her fingers on her lips to
stifle a yawn. "Or if I did, I have forgotten. Why should I have sent
for you?"

She let herself sink back in the cushions, and he pulled a seat near the
couch and sat down. She began to play idly with the coiled golden snake
around her bare arm, looking down at it with long sleepy eyes. Again, as
once before, the novelty of this lack of attention piqued him into a
passing interest.

"If I disturb you, I will go away," he offered. "You were sleeping; it
were pity to disturb such sweet repose."

"You do not disturb me," she answered, with all calmness, not looking at
him. "Why should you? If you like to stay, you may. I am not asleep
now."

"Did you have pleasant dreams?" Marius asked, as he might have asked it
of a child. She turned scornful eyes on him.

"I do not dream asleep!" she said. "Only when I wake. What are dreams
but thoughts, and how can one think, asleep?"

He looked at her, surprised. She relapsed into silence, unwound the
snake from her arm, at length, and took to turning it over and over in
her fingers, letting the light play on its emerald eyes and the rich
chasing of its scales. He continued to watch her, with greater freedom
under her entire indifference. He felt that, if he should ge