“Of course, if that girl were disposed of it would certainly facilitate—­” he mused sagely, then, inconsequential creature, gave me a light tap on the lower part of my waistcoat.  “You old sinner,” he cried jovially, “much you care for proprieties.  But you had better look out for yourself, you know, with a personage like Jacobus who has no sort of reputation to lose.”

He had recovered his gravity of a respectable citizen by that time and added regretfully: 

“All the women of our family are perfectly scandalised.”

But by that time I had given up visiting the S- family and the D-family.  The elder ladies pulled such faces when I showed myself, and the multitude of related young ladies received me with such a variety of looks:  wondering, awed, mocking (except Miss Mary, who spoke to me and looked at me with hushed, pained compassion as though I had been ill), that I had no difficulty in giving them all up.  I would have given up the society of the whole town, for the sake of sitting near that girl, snarling and superb and barely clad in that flimsy, dingy, amber wrapper, open low at the throat.  She looked, with the wild wisps of hair hanging down her tense face, as though she had just jumped out of bed in the panic of a fire.

She sat leaning on her elbow, looking at nothing.  Why did she stay listening to my absurd chatter?  And not only that; but why did she powder her face in preparation for my arrival?  It seemed to be her idea of making a toilette, and in her untidy negligence a sign of great effort towards personal adornment.

But I might have been mistaken.  The powdering might have been her daily practice and her presence in the verandah a sign of an indifference so complete as to take no account of my existence.  Well, it was all one to me.

I loved to watch her slow changes of pose, to look at her long immobilities composed in the graceful lines of her body, to observe the mysterious narrow stare of her splendid black eyes, somewhat long in shape, half closed, contemplating the void.  She was like a spellbound creature with the forehead of a goddess crowned by the dishevelled magnificent hair of a gipsy tramp.  Even her indifference was seductive.  I felt myself growing attached to her by the bond of an irrealisable desire, for I kept my head—­quite.  And I put up with the moral discomfort of Jacobus’s sleepy watchfulness, tranquil, and yet so expressive; as if there had been a tacit pact between us two.  I put up with the insolence of the old woman’s:  “Aren’t you ever going to leave us in peace, my good fellow?” with her taunts; with her brazen and sinister scolding.  She was of the true Jacobus stock, and no mistake.

Directly I got away from the girl I called myself many hard names.  What folly was this?  I would ask myself.  It was like being the slave of some depraved habit.  And I returned to her with my head clear, my heart certainly free, not even moved by pity for that castaway (she was as much of a castaway as any one ever wrecked on a desert island), but as if beguiled by some extraordinary promise.  Nothing more unworthy could be imagined.  The recollection of that tremulous whisper when I gripped her shoulder with one hand and held a plate of chicken with the other was enough to make me break all my good resolutions.