her. He was carrying her on his will.
He accepted a large room with a brick-tiled floor and a large, new brass bed with a coloured cotton cover thrown over it, and with two chairs. The strange, dry, stark emptiness, that looked almost cold in the heat.
“The sun makes you pale. Lie down and rest. I will close the windows,” he said.
He closed the shutters till only a darkness remained.
Then in the darkness, suddenly, softly he touched her, stroking her hip.
“I said you were my wife,” he said, in his small, soft Indian voice. “It is true, isn’t it?”
She trembled, and her limbs seemed to fuse like metal melting down. She fused into a molten unconsciousness, her will, her very self gone, leaving her lying in molten life, like a lake of still fire, unconscious of