She at once went towards him, and gave him her hand.  “I wonder if you know everybody?”

Her clear eyes met his without self-consciousness.  He attempted a swagger.  “I don’t want to know everybody.  How do they happen to be here?”

“I asked them.  And they are really very nice.”

He did not see the niceness.  He had thought to find her in the setting which belonged to her beauty.  The silent night, the fragrance of the garden, the pale statues among the trees, and himself playing the game with a greater sense of its seriousness than ever before.

Throughout the evening George watched for a chance to see Becky alone.  Without conspicuously avoiding him, she had no time for him.  He complained constantly.  “I want to talk to you.  Run away with me, Becky—­and let these people go.”

“It isn’t proper for a hostess to leave her guests.”

“Are you trying to—­punish me?”

“For what?”

So—­she too was playing——!  She had let him come that he might see her—­indifferent.

Becky had danced with George once, and with Randy three times.  George had protested, and Becky had said, “But I promised him before you came——­”

“You knew I was coming?”

“Yes.”

“You might have kept a few——­”

She seemed to consider that.  “Yes, I might.  But not from Randy——­”

At last he said to her, “I have been out in the garden.  There is a star shining in the little pool where the fishes are.  I want you to see the star.”

It was thus he had won her.  He had always seen stars shining in little pools, or a young moon rising from a rosy bed.  But it had never meant anything.  She shook her head.  “I should like to see your little star.  But I haven’t time.”

“Are you afraid to come?”

“Why should I be?”

“Well, there’s Love—­in the garden,” he was daring—­his sparkling eyes tried to hold hers and failed.

She was looking straight beyond him to where Randy stood by a window, tall and thin with his Indian profile, and his high-held head.

“We are going to have watermelons in a minute,” was her romantic response to Dalton’s fire.  “You’d better stay and eat some.”

“I don’t want to eat.  And if you aren’t afraid you’ll come.”

Calvin and Mandy and their son, John, with Flippins’ Daisy, had assembled the watermelons on a long table out-of-doors.  Above the table on the branch of a tree was hung an old ship’s lantern brought by Admiral Meredith to his friend, the Judge.  It gave a faint but steady light, and showed the pink and green and white of the fruit, the dusky faces of the servants as they cut and sliced, and handed plates to the eager and waiting guests.