A green caterpillar was crawling on his sleeve.  In his vague manner he picked it tenderly off and laid it on the leaf of an aloe that grew in the terrace vase near which he stood.

“You couldn’t even hurt that crawling thing—­let alone a woman,” said Zora.  This time very softly.

He blushed.  “If you kill a caterpillar you kill a butterfly,” he said apologetically.

“And if you kill a woman?”

“Is there anything higher?” said he.

She made no reply, her misanthropical philosophy prompting none.  There was rather a long silence, which he broke by asking her if she read Persian.  He excused his knowledge of it by saying that it kept him human.  She laughed and suggested a continuance of their stroll.  He talked disconnectedly as they walked up and down.

The crowd on the terrace thinned as the hour of dejeuner approached.  Presently she proclaimed her hunger.  He murmured that it must be near dinner time.  She protested.  He passed his hands across his eyes and confessed that he had got mixed up in his meals the last few days.  Then an idea struck him.

“If I skip afternoon tea, and dinner, and supper, and petit dejeuner, and have two breakfasts running,” he exclaimed brightly, “I shall begin fair again.”  And he laughed, not loud, but murmuringly, for the first time.

They went round the Casino to the front of the Hotel de Paris, their natural parting place.  But there, on the steps, with legs apart, stood the wretch with the evil eyes.  He looked at her from afar, banteringly.  Defiance rose in Zora’s soul.  She would again show him that she was not a lone and helpless woman at the mercy of the casual depredator.

“I’m taking you in to lunch with me, Mr. Dix.  You can’t refuse,” she said; and without waiting for a reply she sailed majestically past the wretch, followed meekly by Septimus, as if she owned him body and soul.

As usual, many eyes were turned on her as she entered the restaurant—­a radiant figure in white, with black hat and black chiffon boa, and a deep red rose in her bosom.  The maitre d’hotel, in the pride of reflected glory, conducted her to a table near the window.  Septimus trailed inconclusively behind.  When he seated himself he stared at her silently in a mute surmise as the gentlemen in the poem did at the peak in Darien.  It was even a wilder adventure than the memorable drive.  That was but a caprice of the goddess; this was a sign of her friendship.  The newness of their intimacy smote him dumb.  He passed his hand through his Struwel Peter hair and wondered.  Was it real?  There sat the goddess, separated from him by the strip of damask, her gold-flecked eyes smiling frankly and trustfully into his, pulling off her gloves and disclosing, in almost disconcerting intimacy, her warm wrists and hands.  Was he dreaming, as he sometimes did, in broad daylight, of a queer heaven in which he was strong like other men and felt the flutter of wings upon his cheek?  Something soft was in his hand.  Mechanically he began to stuff it up his sleeve.  It was his napkin.  Zora’s laugh brought him to earth—­to happy earth.