He looked at his watch.  “Eleven—­a little after.”

“We’re missing the bathing.  Everybody splashes about the pool or the ocean at this hour.  Then everybody sits on the veranda of The Breakers and drinks things and gossips until luncheon.  Rather intellectual, isn’t it?”

“Sufficiently,” he replied lazily.

She leaned over the parapet, standing on the tips of her white shoes and looked down at the school of fish.  Presently she pointed to a snake swimming against the current.

“A moccasin?” he asked.

“No, only a water snake.  They call everything moccasins down here, but real moccasins are not very common.”

“And rattlesnakes?”

“Scarcer still.  You hear stories, but—­” She shrugged her shoulders.  “Of course when we are quail shooting it’s well to look where you step, but there are more snakes in the latitude of Saint Augustine than there are here.  When father and I are shooting we never think anything about them.  I’m more afraid of those horrid wood-ticks.  Listen; shall we go camping?”

“But I have work on hand,” he said dejectedly.

“That is part of your work.  Father said so.  Anyway I know he means to camp with you somewhere in the hammock, and if Gray goes I go too.”

“Calypso,” he said, “do you know what I’ve been hearing about you?  I’ve heard that you are the most assiduously run-after girl at Palm Beach.  And if you are, what on earth will the legions of the adoring say when you take to the jungle?”

“Who said that about me?” she asked, smiling adorably.

“Is it true?”

“I am—­liked.  Who said it?”

“You don’t mean to say,” he continued perversely, “that I have monopolised the reigning beauty of Palm Beach for an entire morning.”

“Yes, you have and it is high time you understood it. Who said this to you?”

“Well—­I gathered the fact—­”

“Who?”

“My aunt—­Miss Palliser.”

“Do you know,” said Shiela Cardross slowly, “that Miss Palliser has been exceedingly nice to me?  But her friend, Miss Suydam, is not very civil.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said.

“I could tell you that it mattered nothing,” she said, looking straight at him; “and that would be an untruth.  I know that many people disregard such things—­many are indifferent to the opinion of others, or say they are.  I never have been; I want everybody to like me—­even people I have not the slightest interest in—­people I do not even know—­I want them all to like me.  For I must tell you, Mr. Hamil, that when anybody dislikes me, and I know it, I am just as unhappy about it as though I cared for them.”

“It’s absurd for anybody not to like you!” he said.

“Well, do you know it really is absurd—­if they only knew how willing I am to like everybody....  I was inclined to like Miss Suydam.”

Hamil remained silent.