Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders.  He had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her eyes within his sight—­he, Charles Hardiman, might as well have held his tongue.

So very likely it would have been.  But when great matters are ripe for decisions one way or the other, the little accident as often as not decides.  There was a hurrying of light feet in the corridor outside, a swift, peremptory knocking upon the door.  The same woman’s voice called in rather a shrill note through the panels!  “Harry!  Why don’t you come?  We are waiting for you.”

And in the sound of the voice there was not merely impatience, but a note of ownership—­very clear and definite; and hearing it Luttrell hardened.  He stood up straight.  He had the aspect of a man in revolt.

CHAPTER II

AN ANTHEM INTERVENES

Upon the entrance of Hardiman’s party a wrinkle was smoothed away from the forehead of a maitre d’hotel.

“So!  You have come!” he cried.  “I began to despair.”

“You have kept my table?” Sir Charles insisted.

“Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!”; and the maitre d’hotel led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony.  Here the table was set endwise to the balustrade, commanding the crowded visitors, yet taking the coolness of the night.  Hardiman was contented with his choice of its position.  But when he saw his guests reading the cards which assigned them their places, he was not so contented with the order of their seating.

“If I had known an hour before!” he said to himself, and the astounding idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering of food.

However, the harm was done now.  There was Luttrell already seated at the end against the balustrade.  He had the noise of a Babel of tongues and the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each of them, sat Stella Croyle.

“I should have separated them,” Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised and drank his cocktail.  “But how the deuce could I without making everybody stare?  This party wasn’t got up to separate people.  All the same——­”

The hushed wonder of a summer night.  The gaiety of a bright thronged restaurant!  In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable antagonist.  But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by nature, the seduction of both!