the effect of her London clothes. He did not take her down to
dinner. Willie did that. It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .

The evening was delightfully calm. He was sitting apart and alone,
and wishing himself somewhere else--on board the schooner for
choice, with the dinner-harness off. He hadn't exchanged forty
words altogether during the evening with the other guests. He saw
her suddenly all by herself coming towards him along the dimly
lighted terrace, quite from a distance.

She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head
of a character which to him appeared peculiar, something--well--
pagan, crowned with a great wealth of hair. He had been about to
rise, but her decided approach caused him to remain on the seat.
He had not looked much at her that evening. He had not that
freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of society and the frequent
meetings with strangers. It was not shyness, but the reserve of a
man not used to the world and to the practice of covert staring,
with careless curiosity. All he had captured by his first, keen,
instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair was
magnificently red and her eyes very black. It was a troubling
effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till
very unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and
eager, as if she were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic
upward undulation of her whole figure. The light from an open
window fell across her path, and suddenly all that mass of arranged
hair appeared incandescent, chiselled and fluid, with the daring
suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and the flowing lines of
molten metal. It kindled in him an astonished admiration. But he
said nothing of it to his friend the Editor. Neither did he tell