Gilbart eyed them savagely.  He had a word in his mouth which would stop their laughing; and for one irrational moment he was near speaking it, near launching against half a dozen loafers the bolt which only to hold and handle had aged him ten years in an hour.  The word was even on his tongue when a carriage passed and at its open window a young girl leaned forward and looked out on the crowd.  Her face in the light of the entrance-lamp was exquisitely fair, delicately rose and white as the curved inner lip of a sea-shell.  At her throat, where her cloak-collar fell back a little, showing its quilted lining of pale blue satin, a diamond necklace shimmered, and a rosebud of diamonds in her hair sparkled so that it seemed to dance.  It caught Gilbart’s eye, and somehow it seemed to lift and remove her and the house she was entering—­the lit windows, the guests, the Admiral himself—­into another world.  If it were real, then (like enough) this fragile thing, this Dresden goddess, owned a brother, perhaps a lover, on board the Berenice.  If so, here was another world waiting to be shattered—­a world of silks and toys and pretty uniforms and tiny bric-a-brac—­a sort of doll’s house inhabited by angels at play.  But could it be real?  Could such a world exist and be liable as his own to It?  Could the same brutal touch destroy this fabric and the sordid privacies of Prospect Place—­all in a run like a row of card-houses?

“Never you mind ’im, Mister Gilbart,” said a voice at his elbow, and he turned and looked in the face of a girl who, in an interval of dressmaking, had once helped him with his district work.

“Him?”

“The peeler,” Milly Sanders nodded; and it flashed on Gilbart that the policeman’s joke, the carriage, the girl’s face and these thoughts of his had all gone by in something less than ten seconds.  “He’ve got the ’ump to-night, that’s what’s the matter with ’im.”  And Milly Sanders nodded again reassuringly.

“What are you doing here?” Gilbart asked.

“Me?  Oh, it’s in the way of business, as you might say.  I comes here to pick up ’ints.  I s’pose now you thought ’twasn’t very feelin’-’earted, and my Dick gone away foreign only this mornin’?”

He remembered now that the girl’s zeal for Mission work had cooled ever since she had been walking-out with her Dick—­a young stoker in the Berenice.

“I reckon that’s the last of the dinner-guests.  The others won’t be comin’ much before ten.  Well, I’m off to the ’Oe; there’s going to be fireworks, and that’s the best place for seein’.”

“In the way of business, too, I suppose?” said Gilbart, and wondered how he could say it.

Milly giggled.  “You ’ad me there,” she confessed.  “But what’s the good to give way?  I’m sure”—­with conviction—­“it’s just what Dick would like me to do.  I’m going, anyway.  So long!” She paused:  “that is—­ unless you’d like to come along, too?”