which she perceived was charged with suppressed magic as it might have been with suppressed laughter.  The merry find no more difficulty in keeping a straight face than he found in using the flat phrase.  And as she gleefully gazed at him, recognising in him her sort of person, his speech slipped the business leash.  There were hedges of geranium and poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a rastaqouere.  “Mhm,” said Mr. Philip sagaciously, and from the funeral slide of respect in his voice Ellen guessed that he imagined rastaqouere to be a Brazilian variety of Lord Provost.  She would have laughed had there not been the plainest intimation that he was still upset about something in his question whether Yaverland thought he would be well advised to sell the house, whether he had any reasonable expectation of recovering the capital he had sunk in it; for she had noticed that whenever Mr. Philip felt miserable he was wont to try and cheer himself by suggesting that somebody had been “done.”

But that worry was dissolved by the enchantment of Yaverland’s answer.  He hadn’t the slightest idea what he had paid for the villa.  It happened this way.  He had won a lot of money at poker ("Tchk!  Tchk!” said Mr. Philip, half shocked, but showing by the way he put one thumb in his waistcoat arm-hole that he was so far sensible of the change in the atmosphere that he felt the need of some romantic gesture), and had felt no shame in pocketing it since it came from a man who was gambling to try to show that he wasn’t a Jew.  Ellen hated him for that.  She believed in absolute racial equality, and sometimes intended to marry a Hindu as a propagandist measure.  And then he had remembered that a friend of his, de Cayagun of the Villa Miraflores, was broke and wanted to move.  Even Rio was tired of poor de Cayagun, though he’d given it plenty of fun.  There had been great times at the villa.  His phrases, which seemed to have scent and colour as well as meaning, made her see red pools of wine on the marble floor and rose wreaths about the bronze whale’s snout, and hear from the orange grove the sound of harps, yet from a sullenness in his faint smile she deduced there had been something dark in this delight.  Perhaps somebody had got drunk.  But he was saying now that that time had come to an end long before the night when he had won this money from Demetrios.  De Cayagun had no more jewels to give away and even the servants had all left him....  She saw night invading the villa like a sickness of the light, the pools of wine lying black on marble that the dusk had made blue like cold flesh; and this stranger standing