her at last, she laid down her work gently and, with noiseless
movements, retreated from the verandah. In fact, she vanished.

But I was not thinking of her. I was looking at the girl. It was
what I was coming for daily; troubled, ashamed, eager; finding in
my nearness to her a unique sensation which I indulged with dread,
self-contempt, and deep pleasure, as if it were a secret vice bound
to end in my undoing, like the habit of some drug or other which
ruins and degrades its slave.

I looked her over, from the top of her dishevelled head, down the
lovely line of the shoulder, following the curve of the hip, the
draped form of the long limb, right down to her fine ankle below a
torn, soiled flounce; and as far as the point of the shabby, high-
heeled, blue slipper, dangling from her well-shaped foot, which she
moved slightly, with quick, nervous jerks, as if impatient of my
presence. And in the scent of the massed flowers I seemed to
breathe her special and inexplicable charm, the heady perfume of
the everlastingly irritated captive of the garden.

I looked at her rounded chin, the Jacobus chin; at the full, red
lips pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of
the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre
eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and
intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and
so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her
own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my sight
amongst the trees.

And suddenly, without looking at me, with the appearance of a