"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

Alexander's painting, Lady on a Couch, where the converging stripes of the lady's robe carry the eye
forcibly from the lower left margin to her face at the upper right."

Anna glanced nervously toward the garden entrance, then whispered entreatingly. "Then you'd better go.
You've got to be beyond the fountain when they look in."

He sniffed. "All right, I know when I'm not wanted. That's the gratitude I get for making you into a rose."

"I don't care a tinker's damn for a white rose. Scat!"

He laughed, then turned and started on around the path.

As Anna followed the graceful stride of his long legs, her face began to writhe in alternate bitterness and
admiration. She groaned softly. "YouтАФfiend! You gorgeous, egotistical, insufferable unattainable
FIEND! You aren't elated because you're saving my life; I am just a blotch of pigment in your latest
masterpiece. I hate you!"

He was past the fountain now, and nearing the position he had earlier indicated.

She could see that he was looking toward the archway. She was afraid to look there.

Now he must stop and wait for his audience.

Only he didn't. His steps actually hastened.

That meant...

The woman trembled, closed her eyes, and froze into a paralytic stupor through which the crunch of the
man's sandals filtered as from a great distance, muffled, mocking.

And then, from the direction of the archway, came the quiet scraping of more footsteps.

In the next split second she would know life or death.

But even now, even as she was sounding the iciest depths of her terror, her lips were moving with the
clear insight of imminent death. "No, I don't hate you. I love you, Ruy. I have loved you from the first."

At that instant a blue-hot ball of pain began crawling slowly up within her body, along her spine, and then
outward between her shoulder blades, into her spinal hump. The intensity of that pain forced her slowly
to her knees and pulled her head back in an invitation to scream.

But no sound came from her convulsing throat.
It was unendurable, and she was fainting.

The sound of footsteps died away down the Via. At least Ruy's ruse had worked.

And as the mounting anguish spread over her back, she understood that all sound had vanished with
those retreating footsteps, forever, because she could no longer hear, nor use her vocal chords. She had
forgotten how, but she didn't care.