“The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You’ll have your freedom some day, you know.”
“And we’re already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don’t we?”
“It even seems to me,” he ventured, “it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.”
“In point of fact,” he concluded, surprised, “we _are_ friends—in a way. Wouldn’t you call it—friendship?”
“I think so, I think I’d call it that,” she admitted.
“I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.”
The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.
“You see,” he went on, “when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they’re likely to be afraid of being in each other’s way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other’s friendly consideration. Don’t you think so, Tressa?”
Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. “Yes,” she said. “And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.”
She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, “heavenly—azure.”
“Are we really going away together?” she asked timidly.
He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:
“You _are_ tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.”
The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.
“We’ll go South,” he said.... “I’m so glad that you don’t feel lonely with me.”
“Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?”
“Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don’t you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?”
“It was always June in Yian,” she said under her breath.
She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.
Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.