her slave.  Peregrine Ditton, Harry Ellice, even the cleric Binning—­let alone the permanently self-conscious, attitudinizing Wace—­with other newer acquaintances, English and foreign, ran at her heels.  And she let them run, bless her, even encouraged their running by turns of naughty disdain and waywardness.  She was fatal to boys—­that was in the natural course of things.  And fatal to those considerably older than boys—­perhaps—­

The music flew faster and faster—­stopped with a shriek and a crash.  Laughing, talking, the dancers streamed out of the hot brightly lighted room into the soft peace, the delicate phantasy of the colourless moonlight.

Carteret drew back, flattening himself against the iron pillar in the shadow, as they passed down the steps into the garden below; the women’s pale airy forms and the men’s dark ones, pacing the shining paths in groups and couples, between the flower-beds, under the flat-headed pines, the shaggy-stemmed palms and towering eucalyptus, in and out massed banks of blossoming shrubs and dwarf hedges of monthly roses.

Midway in the light-hearted procession came Damaris, Peregrine Ditton on one side of her, Harry Ellice on the other.  Leaving the main alley, the trio turned along a path, running parallel to the verandah, which opened into a circle surrounding the stone basin of a tinkling fountain, immediately below Colonel Carteret’s post of solitary observation.

Damaris carried the demi-train of her white satin gown over her arm, thereby revealing a wealth of lace frilled petticoat, from beneath which the toes of her high-heeled, white satin shoes stepped with a pretty measured tread.  The two boys, leaning a little towards one another, talked across her, their voices slightly raised in argument, not to say dispute.

“I call it rotten mean to bag my dance like that, I tell you.—­Go away?—­No I swear I won’t go away, won’t budge one blessed inch unless Miss Verity actually orders me to.  If my dance was stolen, all the more reason I should have her to talk to now as a sort of make-up.  So you just clear out, if you please, my good chap, and leave the field to your elders and betters.  Remove your superfluous carcass till further notice.—­Vamoose, my son, do you hear?”

This excitedly from Peregrine Ditton.  They reached the fountain.  Damaris stayed her measured walk, and stood gazing at the jet of water in its uprush and myriad sparkling fall.  Ellice answered chaffingly yet with an underlying growl; and the dispute threatened to wax warm.  But the girl heeded neither disputant, her attention rapt in watching the play of the falling water.