“Do you know,” Tommy said, “what I have told you is really at least half the truth?  If I did not come here to see you disdaining the sun, I think I did come to see you disdaining me.  Odd, is it not, if true, that a man should travel so far to see a lip curl up?”

“You don’t seem to know what brought you,” she said.

“It seems so monstrous,” he replied, musing.  “Oh, yes, I am quite certain that the curl of the lip is responsible for my being here; it kept sending me constant telegrams; but what I want to know is, do I come for the pleasure of the thing or for the pain?  Do I like your disdain, Alice, or does it make me writhe?  Am I here to beg you to do it again, or to defy it?”

“Which are you doing now?” she inquired.

“I had hoped,” he said with a sigh, “that you could tell me that.”

On another occasion they reached the same point in this discussion, and went a little beyond it.  It was on a wet afternoon, too, when Tommy had vowed to himself to mend his ways.  “That disdainful look is you,” he told her, “and I admire it more than anything in nature; and yet, Alice, and yet——­”

“Well?” she answered coldly, but not moving, though he had come suddenly too near her.  They were on a private veranda of the hotel, and she was lolling in a wicker chair.

“And yet,” he said intensely, “I am not certain that I would not give the world to have the power to drive that look from your face.  That, I begin to think, is what brought me here.”

“But you are not sure,” she said, with a shrug of the shoulder.

It stung him into venturing further than he had ever gone with her before.  Not too gently, he took her head in both his hands and forced her to look up at him.  She submitted without a protest.  She was disdainful, but helpless.

“Well?” she said again.

He withdrew his hands, and she smiled mockingly.

“If I thought——­” he cried with sudden passion, and stopped.

“You think a great deal, don’t you?” she said.  She was going now.

“If I thought there was any blood in your veins, you icy woman——­”

“Or in your own,” said she.  But she said it a little fiercely, and he noticed that.

“Alice,” he cried, “I know now.  It is to drive that look from your face that I am here.”

She courtesied from the door.  She was quite herself again.

But for that moment she had been moved.  He was convinced of it, and his first feeling was of exultation as in an achievement.  I don’t know what you are doing just now, Lady Pippinworth, but my compliments to you, and T. Sandys is swelling.

There followed on this exultation another feeling as sincere—­devout thankfulness that he had gone no further.  He drew deep breaths of relief over his escape, but knew that he had not himself to thank.  His friends, the little sprites, had done it, in return for the amusement he seemed to give them.  They had stayed him in the nick of time, but not earlier; it was quite as if they wanted Tommy to have his fun first.  So often they had saved him from being spitted, how could he guess that the great catastrophe was fixed for to-night, and that henceforth they were to sit round him counting his wriggles, as if this new treatment of him tickled them even more than the other?