the tarnished gorgeousness of his Turkish slippers for example, and his
towzled head, and the bathing-towel that flowed like a piece of classic
drapery from his shoulder), obeying impulse and instinct, he flung
himself into the breach.

"Brutes," he muttered between his teeth. Then, in his easiest
man-of-the-worldy accents, "If you can wait two minutes," he called
aloud to her. And therewith he went scrambling down the terraces and
picked his way from stone to stone across the shallows, to the field of
anemones, where their satiny petals, like crisping wavelets, all
a-ripple in the moving air, shimmered with constantly changing lights.
And in a twinkling he had gathered a great armful, and was clambering
back.

"I beg of you," he said, in his abrupt fashion, holding them out to
her, and slightly bowing, with that nothing-doubting assurance of his,
while his blue eyes (to put her entirely at her ease) smiled, frank and
friendly and serene, into her dark ones.

But hers seemed troubled. She looked at the flowers, she looked at John,
I think she even looked at her lira. Her eyes seemed undecided.

"Do pray take them," said he, still smiling, still frank and assured,
but as if a little puzzled, a little amused, by her hesitation, and more
airily a man-of-the-world than ever, his tone one of high detachment, to
spare her any possible feeling of personal obligation, and to place his
performance in the light of a matter of course,--as if indeed he had
done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might
have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady
Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's