Mr. Gilman had gone forward in advance to make sure that his yacht was in a state worthy to receive two such ladies, and he had insisted on meeting them in his car at Abbeville on the way to Boulogne.  He had not insisted on meeting Musa similarly.  He was a peculiar and in some respects a stiff-necked man.  He had decided, in his own mind, that he would have the two women to himself in the car, and so indeed it fell out.  Nevertheless his attitude to Musa, and Madame Piriac’s attitude to Musa, and everybody’s attitude to Musa, had shown that the mere prospect of star-concerts in a first-class hall had very quickly transformed Musa into a genuine Parisian lion.  He was positively courted.  His presence on the yacht was deemed an honour, and that was why Mr. Gilman had asked him.  Audrey both resented the remarkable change and was proud of it—­as a mother perhaps naturally would do and be.  The admitted genius was to arrive the next morning.

On boarding the Ariadne in the wake of Mr. Gilman and Madame Piriac, the first thing that impressed Audrey was the long gangway itself.  It was made of thin resilient steel, and the handrails were of soft white rope, almost like silk, and finished off with fancy knots; and at the beginning of the gangway, on the dirty quay, lay a beautiful mat bearing the name of the goddess, while at the end, on the pale, smooth deck, was another similar mat.  The obvious costliness of that gangway and those superlative mats made Audrey feel poor, in spite of her ten million francs.  And the next thing that impressed her was that immediately she got down on deck the yacht, in a very mysterious manner, had grown larger, and much larger.  At the forward extremity of the deck certain blue figures lounging about seemed to be quite a long way off, indeed in another world.  Here and there on the deck were circles of yellow or white rope, coiled as precisely and perfectly as Audrey could coil her own hair.  Mr. Gilman led them to the door of the deck-house and they gazed within.  The sight of the interior drew out of the ravished Audrey an ecstatic exclamation:  “What a darling!” And at the words she saw that Mr. Gilman, for all his assumed nonchalant spryness, almost trembled with pleasure.  The deck-house was a drawing-room whose walls were of carved and inlaid wood.  Orange-shaded electric bulbs hung on short, silk cords from the ceiling, and flowers in sconces showed brilliantly between the windows, which were draped with curtains of silk matching the thick carpet.  Several lounge chairs and a table of bird’s-eye maple completed the place, and over the table were scattered newspapers and illustrated weeklies.  Everything, except the literature, was somewhat diminished in size, but the smallness of the scale only intensified the pleasure derived from the spectacle.