First as she stood there, one realized in her figure the springing pose of immaturity, in her gaze the wraptness and fixity of the devotee. Altogether she was of so exquisite a finish and delicacy that one would wish to have plucked her like a flower. She was dressed in a smooth, seamless bodice of tawny skin, baring the throat and rounded upper arm; below that a skirt of thin green was shaped to her young curves by the vagrant wind. Her hair, which was all of burnt gold, powdered with ashes of gold, was drawn loosely back and confined close to her head, but fell free to her hips, blown forward, defining her like the sheath of a flower. Her brows also were touched with gold and the eyes under her brows were like agate at the bottom of a brook.
She wore no jewels but a thread of scarlet berries that, in its revealing femininity, in the way it took the curve of her slender throat and ran into the little hollow between her breasts, so seemed to me as if I had never seen a more endearing ornament. As she appeared among us,—for though she had walked very quietly out of the forest there was that appealing quality of her loveliness which gave to her coming the swiftness of a vision,—as she appeared thus, a ring of smiling ran sensibly about the hushed, observing circle.
She moved in the exultation of her shining mood, unconscious of the way her feet went or what eyes were upon her, to the sound of the shallow drums and the delicate high flutes. As the music dropped she stopped before Persilope, who stood forward a little with some formal words of ritual or salutation. I missed the exact words, all my attention taken up with what had happened to Mancha. He had been standing just behind the chief, and in the brief interval while Zirriloë had come ten steps or so out of the shadow, he had passed, as though her beauty had been some swift, vivifying shock, from being a grave beholder to an active participant of the occasion. Deep red surged up in his face and left it pale again, his eyes, which were blue, burned amber points and took her like a flame. He shook as though the joints of his spirit were loosed, and took the full red under-lip in his teeth to keep back the tide of strength that came on him as he looked at her. His breath came purringly. I saw the soul of the man lithe and rippling in him, the glint of his eyes, the mass and thickness of his body incredibly lifted and lightened by the consciousness of the Mate. He did not know what had happened to him, but he laughed to himself his joy in her, as she moved wrapped in her high errand down the still summer glade, and across the meadow.