She glanced at him as she spoke, for his tone had been muffled and indistinct. There was a deep furrow in his forehead which she had not seen before.
Thorn was looking away from her, toward the lane, where, beyond the hedge, a man was passing, half-singing, half-chanting to himself in a repressed, sepulchral voice.
"My mother died, too, when I was a little girl," she added, "so I know really very little about him."
She had forgotten to look for the Flower-of-Dream. They had come to the little lake with its mossy stones and basking, orange carp. Through the gap in the shrubbery the white witchery of Fuji-San glowed in the sun with far-faint shudderings of lilac fire. She sat down on a sunny boulder. Thorn stooped over the water, looking into its cool, green depths, and she saw him pass his hand over his brow in that familiar, half-hesitant gesture of the day before.
"Will you tell me that little?" he asked. "I think I should like to hear."
"I very seldom talk about him," she said, looking dreamily out across the distance, "but not because I don't like to. You see, knowing so little, I used to dream out the rest, so that he came to seem quite real. Does that sound very childish and fanciful?"
"Tell me the dreams," he answered. "Mine are always more true than facts."
"He was born," she began, "in the Mediterranean--"
She turned her head. The stone on which Thorn's foot rested had crashed into the water. He staggered slightly in regaining his balance, and his face had the pale, startled look it wore when he had first seen her from the roadside. He drew back, and again his hand went up across his face.
"In the Mediterranean--just where, I don't know, but on an island--and his mother was Romaic. I have never seen Greece, but I like to know that some of it is in my blood. His father was American, of a family that had a tradition of Gipsy descent. Perhaps he was born with the 'thumb-print' on the palm that they call the Romany mark. As a child I used to wonder what it looked like."
She smiled up at him, but his face was turned away. He had taken his hand from his brow, and slipped it into his loose sleeve, and stood rigidly erect.
"I often used to try to imagine his mother. I am sure she had a dark and beautiful face, with large, brown eyes like a wild deer's, that used to bend above his cradle. Perhaps each night she crossed her fingers over him, and said--"