Running Sands Part 22

For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it--his eyes shone and his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young--he was still young!

"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.

This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers, but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head, with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her arms about his waist.

"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our beginning."

He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him to a great tenderness.

"Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of something that will never have an end."

Her dusky eyes glowed.

"Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?"

"How could it, sweetheart?"

"But I mean it will always go on like this--just like this. I don't want us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely satisfied--just--just affectionate and fond."

"We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel."

"Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It must all be honeymoon, forever and forever."

He raised her face and kissed her.

"Always," he said--"always morning. We will never let the shadows lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her again. "You know that we will?" he asked.

"I know--I know," she answered.

They had no quarrels. There was only one matter in which she deviated so much as a hair's breadth from his ideal of her and there was but one occasion when she was hurt by any act of his.

The first of these affairs sprang from a conversation started by a letter with a blue French twenty-five-centime stamp upon it, which their always discreet waiter brought to the rooms one morning with the coffee.

It had been forwarded from New York.

"What's that?" asked Muriel.

Stainton had been reading with his iron-grey brows in a pucker and a smile on his lips.

"It is a Frenchman trying to write English," he said. "He doesn't succeed."

"Yes, but what _is_ it?"

"Only business, dear."

"Then I ought to see it," said Muriel.

Stainton laughed.

"What?" he said.

"If it is business, I ought to see it," she repeated.

"Trouble your little head with such matters? Not much."

She came to him as if to kiss him, then quickly seized the letter and ran laughing away. He pursued her, laughing, too; but she was more agile than her husband, and she managed easily to evade him until her eyes had caught enough of the letter to enable her to guess its entire contents.

"So they want to buy your mine?" she asked. "They say their expert has returned and reported"--she glanced again at the letter as his fingers closed on it--"reported favourably."

"Yes," he said; "it's a French syndicate, some wealthy men in Lyons, and they want to buy the mine."

"But you won't sell?"

"If I can get my figure, I will."

"Your mine?"

"Our mine."

For that she kissed him.

"But, if it's ours, I have something to say about it, and I won't let you."

"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her pretty a.s.sumption.

"Because I think it would be horrid of you to sell it after all the years you spent looking for it."

"I wasn't looking for it on its own account, dear; I was looking for it because of what it would bring me."

"I wish you'd take me to see it."

"It's a dull place, Muriel."

"I wish you'd take me. I wouldn't find it dull."

"I shall take you to France instead."

"To sell the mine?"

"To try."

"Horrid!" she pouted.

"But, dearest," he explained, "I don't want to have a mine on my hands.

I have you."

"Do I keep you busy?"

"You are a gold mine. Don't you see? I want to be free. If I can get my price, we shall be rich."