Thus soliloquising, he reached the dining-room.  The scene that unfolded itself before him was typical—­the table over-loaded, the women over-dressed.

The luncheon was already in full course when he came.  He mumbled an apology and seated himself on the only remaining chair next to a youth who reminded him of a well-dressed dummy.  With slight weariness his eyes wandered in all directions for more congenial faces when they were arrested by a lady on the opposite side of the table.  She was clad in a silk robe with curiously embroidered net-work that revealed a nervous and delicate throat.  The rich effect of the net-work was relieved by the studied simplicity with which her heavy chestnut-colored hair was gathered in a single knot.  Her face was turned away from him, but there was something in the carriage of her head that struck him as familiar.  When at last she looked him in the face, the glass almost fell from his hand:  it was Ethel Brandenbourg.  She seemed to notice his embarrassment and smiled.  When she opened her lips to speak, he knew by the haunting sweetness of the voice that he was not mistaken.

“Tell me,” she said wistfully, “you have forgotten me?  They all have.”

He hastened to assure her that he had not forgotten her.  He recollected now that he had first been introduced to her in Walkham’s house some years ago, when a mere college boy, he had been privileged to attend one of that master’s famous receptions.  She had looked quite resolute and very happy then, not at all like the woman who had stared so strangely at Reginald in the Broadway restaurant.

He regarded this encounter as very fortunate.  He knew so much of her personal history that it almost seemed to him as if they had been intimate for years.  She, too, felt on familiar ground with him.  Neither as much as whispered the name of Reginald Clarke.  Yet it was he, and the knowledge of what he was to them, that linked their souls with a common bond.

XIV

It was the third day after their meeting.  Hour by hour their intimacy had increased.  Ethel was sitting in a large wicker-chair.  She restlessly fingered her parasol, mechanically describing magic circles in the sand.  Ernest lay at her feet.  With his knees clasped between his hands, he gazed into her eyes.

“Why are you trying so hard to make love to me?” the woman asked, with the half-amused smile with which the Eve near thirty receives the homage of a boy.  There is an element of insincerity in that smile, but it is a weapon of defence against love’s artillery.

Sometimes, indeed, the pleading in the boy’s eyes and the cry of the blood pierces the woman’s smiling superiority.  She listens, loves and loses.

Ethel Brandenbourg was listening, but the idea of love had not yet entered into her mind.  Her interest in Ernest was due in part to his youth and the trembling in his voice when he spoke of love.  But what probably attracted her most powerfully was the fact that he intimately knew the man who still held her woman’s heart in the hollow of his hand.  It was half in play, therefore, that she had asked him that question.