The view from the veranda, at least, appealed to our heroine’s artistic sense.  The marshes in the middle distance, the shimmering sea beyond, and the polo field laid down like a vast green carpet in the foreground; while the players, in white breeches and bright shirts, on the agile little horses that darted hither and thither across the turf lent an added touch of colour and movement to the scene.  Amongst them, Trixton Brent most frequently caught the eye and held it.  Once Honora perceived him flying the length of the field, madly pursued, his mallet poised lightly, his shirt bulging in the wind, his close-cropped head bereft of a cap, regardless of the havoc and confusion behind him.  He played, indeed, with the cocksureness and individuality one might have expected; and Honora, forgetting at moments the disturbing elements by which she was surrounded, followed him with fascination.  Occasionally his name rippled from one end of the crowded veranda to the other, and she experienced a curious and uncomfortable sensation when she heard it in the mouths of these strangers.

From time to time she found herself watching them furtively, comparing them unconsciously with her Quicksands friends.  Some of them she had remarked before, at contests of a minor importance, and they seemed to her to possess a certain distinction that was indefinable.  They had come to-day from many mysterious (and therefore delightful) places which Honora knew only by name, and some had driven the twenty-five odd miles from the bunting community of Banbury in coaches and even those new and marvellous importations—­French automobiles.  When the game had ended, and Lily Dallam was cajoling the club steward to set her tea-table at once, a group of these visitors halted on the lawn, talking and laughing gayly.  Two of the younger men Honora recognized with a start, but for a moment she could not place them—­until suddenly she remembered that she had seen them on her wedding trip at Hot Springs.  The one who lisped was Mr. Cuthbert, familiarly known as “Toots”:  the other, taller and slimmer and paler, was Jimmy Wing.  A third, the regularity of whose features made one wonder at the perfection which nature could attain when she chose, who had a certain Gallic appearance (and who, if the truth be told, might have reminded an impartial eye of a slightly animated wax clothing model), turned, stared, hesitated, and bowed to Lily Dallam.

“That’s Reggie Farwel, who did my house in town,” she whispered to Honora.  “He’s never been near me since it was finished.  He’s utterly ruined.”

Honora was silent.  She tried not to look at the group, in which there were two women of very attractive appearance, and another man.

“Those people are so superior,” Mrs. Dallam continued.