"Now our night-cap and good night!"
She drank hurriedly. Thereafter she yawned and made her little
pretense of increased drowsiness.
"It's been such a long day," she said. "You'll forgive me if I tumble
right straight into sleepy-land?"
Again they said good night and she left him, going down among the eerie
dancing shadows to her own quarter, drawing his moody eyes after her.
When she had gone, he threw down his own blanket across the main
entrance of the King's Palace, filled his pipe again, and sat staring
out into the night.
The fire cast up its red flare spasmodically, licked at the last of the
dead branches which, rolling apart, burned out upon the rock floor.
The darkness once more blotted out all detail saving the few
smouldering coals, the knobs of stone in the small flickering circles
of light, the quiet form of the man silhouetted against the lesser dark
of the night without. Virginia, rigid and motionless at the spot to
which she had stolen noiselessly, watched him breathlessly.
For only a little he sat smoking. Then, as though he experienced
something of that weariness of which she had made pretense, he laid his
pipe aside and stretched out upon his blanket, leaning upon an elbow.
She heard him sigh, vaguely made out when he let his head slip down
upon an arm, saw that he had grown still, and was lying stretched out
across the main threshold.
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