She knelt beside him, saw the one great beauty of the hardy bronzed face, the mouth now relaxed, with the perfect lip lines of a young Antinous.  She bent over him intent, reading his face as a child reads some forbidden book, reading it feature by feature as a woman reads for the first time with understanding a passionate love-poem.  Ah, if he would but open his eyes and then sleep again and never know.  He moved, and she drew back ready for flight, shy and startled.  And now he was quiet.  “I must—­I must,” she murmured.  “His lips?  Ah! would they forgive?—­and—­if, if he wakens, I shall die of shame.  Oh, naughty love of mine that was so cruel yesterday, I forgive you!” What would he do—­must he do—­if he wakened?  The risk, the urgent passion of appealing love, gave her approach the quality of a sacred ceremonial.  She bent lower, not breathing, fearful, helpless, and dropt on his forehead a kiss, light as the touch a honey-seeking butterfly leaves on an unstirred flower.  He moved a little; she rose in alarm and backed to the door.  “Oh! why did I?” she said to herself, reproachful for a moment’s delicious weakness.  She looked back at the motionless sleeper, as she stood in the doorway.  “Why did I?—­but then he does look so young—­and innocent.”

Once more in the world of custom, she fled through the forest shadows, and far away sank down panting.  She caught up the tumbled downfall of hair, and suddenly another Leila, laughed as she remembered that he would miss the game-bag he had set at his side.  How puzzled he would be when he missed it.  Amused delight in his wondering search captured her.  She saw again the beauty of his mouth and the face above it as she recalled what her Aunt Margaret Grey had mischievously said to her, a girl, of James Penhallow.  “He has the one Penhallow beauty—­the mouth, but then he has that monumental Penhallow nose—­it might be in the way.”  She had not understood, but now she did, and again laughing went away homeward, not at all unhappy or repentant, for who would ever know, and love is a priest who gives absolution easily.

CHAPTER XXXIV

In her room she went straight to the long cheval glass and looked at Leila Grey.  “So, he will never ask me again?” The mirror reported a quite other answer.  “Mark Rivers once said conscience runs down at times like a watch.  I must have forgotten to wind up mine.  How could I have done it!” She blushed a little at the remembrance.  “Well, he will never know.”  She dressed in white summer garb with unusual care and went down the stairs smiling.

“The Captain is not in yet,” said the maid.

She waited long for John Penhallow, who had gone up the back stairs, and now at last came down to dinner.

“Excuse me, Leila.  I was so very tired that I fell asleep in the old cabin, but I had a noble tramp, and there are some birds, not many; I shot badly.”  He said no word of the displaced game-bag, which made her uneasy, but talked of the mills and of some trouble at the mines about wages.  She pretended to be interested.