"Does she teach you that you grow every day more beautiful?" He was willing to prove whether Gnulemah could thus be disconcerted. Many a woman had he known, surprisingly innocent until a chance word or glance betrayed profoundest depths.
"Our beauty is like the garden, which is beautiful every day, though no day is just like another. But the changes I mean are in the spirit that looks back at me from her eyes, when I enter deeply into them."
What connection could, after all, subsist between beauty and vanity in one who neither had rivals nor aught to rival for? Doubtless she enjoyed her beauty,--the more, as her taste was pure of conventional falsities. How much of worldly experience would it take to vitiate that integrity in her? Would it not be better to leave her to end her life, restricted to the same innocent and lovely companionship which had been hers thus far? Here the hoopoe, startled at some movement that Balder made, abandoned his perch on his mistress's shoulder, and flew to the top of the palm-tree. Had the day when such friends would suffice her needs gone by?
Yes, it was now too late. No one who has beheld the sun can thenceforth dispense with it. Balder had shone across the beautiful recluse's path, and linked her to outside realities by a chain which, whether he went or stayed, would never break. Flowers, birds, shadows in the mirror,--less than nothing would these things be to her from this hour on.
Heretofore the intercourse between the two had been tentative and incoherent,--a doubtful, aimless grappling with strange conditions which seemed delightful, but might mask unknown dangers. No solid basis of mutual acquaintanceship had been even approached. Balder, accustomed though he was to woman's society, knew not how to apply his experience here; while Gnulemah had not yet perhaps decided whether her visitor were natural or supernatural. The man was probably the less at ease of the two, finding himself in a pass through which tradition nor culture could pilot him. Gnulemah, being used to daily communion with things mysterious to her understanding, would scarcely have altered her demeanor had Balder turned out to be a genie!
But the first step towards fixing the relations between them was already taken. The young man's abrupt movement of his hand to his face (probably with purpose to stroke the beard no longer growing there) had not only scared away the hoopoe, but had flashed on Gnulemah a ray from the diamond ring.
She rose to her feet suddenly, yet easily as a startled serpent rears erect its body. Vivid emotion lightened in her face. Balder knew not what to make of the look she gleamed at him.