Throughout the evening she had easily been chief centre of attraction, besieged by partners.  And those not only her present rival attendants or Marshall Wace; but by Mrs. Frayling’s various importations, plus Mr. Alban Titherage—­a fat, smart and very forthcoming young London stock-broker, lately established, in company of a pretty, silly, phthisis-stricken wife, at the Grand Hotel.  Very much mistress of herself, Damaris had danced straight through the programme with an air of almost defiant vivacity.  Now, as it seemed, her mood had changed and sobered.  For presently Colonel Carteret saw her bosom heave, while she fetched a long sigh and, raising her head, glanced upwards, her great eyes searching the shadowed space of the verandah.

The cool lunar brightness flooded her upturned face, her bare neck and arms, the glittering folds of her satin gown.  She was exceedingly fair to look upon just now.  For an appreciable length of time her glance met Carteret’s and held it; giving him—­though the least neurotic of men, calm of body and of mind—­a strange sensation as of contact with an electric current which tingled through every nerve and vein.  And this, although he perceived that, dazzled by the moonlight, she either did not see or quite failed to recognize him.  An expression of disappointment, akin, so he read it, to hope defeated, crossed her face.  She lowered her eyes, and moved slowly forward along the path, the boys on either side her.  Again Peregrine Ditton took up his tale—­in softened accents though still as one sorely injured and whose temper consequently inclines not unjustly to the volcanic.

“Upon my honour, I think you might have given me just a minute’s law, Miss Verity,” he protested.  “It was no fault of mine being late.  Maud Callowgas kept me toddling to the most unconscionable extent.  First she wanted an ice, and then a tumbler of lemon squash; and then she lost her fan, or pretended she did, and expected me to hunt for the beastly thing.  I give you my word I was as rude as sin, in hope of shaking her off; but she didn’t, or wouldn’t, see what I was driving at.  There was no getting away from her.  I tell you she sticks like a burr, that girl, once she lays hold of you.  Octopuses aren’t in it.  Her power of adhesion is something utterly frantic “—­

Here Ellice cut in with a doubtless scathing though, to Carteret, inaudible remark, at which Damaris laughed outright; and the fresh young voices trailed away in the distance alternately mocking and remonstrant.

As he listened, still conscious of contact with that surprising electric current, Carteret found himself taking stock of his own forty-nine years with swift and lively repugnance.  To accept the sum of them, and the limitations and restrictions that sum is currently supposed to entail, proved just now astonishingly difficult.  Damaris, as beheld in the fantastic loveliness of the moonlight, her searching, unseeing eyes meeting and dwelling upon his own, the look of disappointment and defeat crossing her sweetly serious countenance, wrought upon him begetting a dangerous madness in his blood.  That it was dangerous and a madness, and therefore promptly to be mastered and ejected, he would not permit himself an instant’s doubt.  Yet it very shrewdly plagued him, daring even to advance specious arguments upon its own behalf.