Though he didn’t look up he felt the eyes of the young woman opposite raking him like searchlights, and Rose’s eyes were on him too, he knew, but they rested on him unquestioningly, beautifully, like a benediction.  How long would they go on doing that once Lady Caroline was there?  He didn’t know; he didn’t know anything.

He wiped his moustache for the twentieth unnecessary time, and could not quite keep his hand steady, and the young woman opposite saw his hand not being quite steady, and her eyes raked him persistently.  Why did her eyes rake him persistently?  He didn’t know; he didn’t know anything.

Then Briggs leapt to his feet.  What was the matter with Briggs?  Oh—­yes—­quite:  she had come.

Frederick wiped his moustache and got up too.  He was in for it now.  Absurd, fantastic situation.  Well, whatever happened he could only drift—­drift, and look like an ass to Lady Caroline, the most absolute as well as deceitful ass—­an ass who was also a reptile, for she might well think he had been mocking her out in the garden when he said, no doubt in a shaking voice—­fool and ass—­that he had come because he couldn’t help it; while as for what he would look like to his Rose—­when Lady Caroline introduced him to her—­when Lady Caroline introduced him as her friend whom she had invited in to dinner—­well, God alone knew that.

He, therefore, as he got up wiped his moustache for the last time before the catastrophe.

But he was reckoning without Scrap.

That accomplished and experienced young woman slipped into the chair Briggs was holding for her, and on Lotty’s leaning across eagerly, and saying before any one else could get a word in, “Just fancy, Caroline, how quickly Rose’s husband has got here!” turned to him without so much as the faintest shadow of surprise on her face, and held out her hand, and smiled like a young angel, and said, “and me late your very first evening.”

The daughter of the Droitwiches. . .

Chapter 22

That evening was the evening of the full moon.  The garden was an enchanted place where all the flowers seemed white.  The lilies, the daphnes, the orange-blossom, the white stocks, the white pinks, the white roses—­you could see these as plainly as in the day-time; but the coloured flowers existed only as fragrance.

The three younger women sat on the low wall at the end of the top garden after dinner, Rose a little apart from the others, and watched the enormous moon moving slowly over the place where Shelley had lived his last months just on a hundred years before.  The sea quivered along the path of the moon.  The stars winked and trembled.  The mountains were misty blue outlines, with little clusters of lights shining through from little clusters of homes.  In the garden the plants stood quite still, straight and unstirred by the smallest ruffle of air.  Through the glass doors the dining-room, with its candle-lit table and brilliant flowers—­nasturtiums and marigolds that night—­glowed like some magic cave of colour, and the three men smoking round it looked strangely animated figures seen from the silence, the huge cool calm of outside.