ine, 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.

Mrs. Fisher had gone to the drawing-room and the fire. Scrap and
Lotty, their faces upturned to the sky, said very little and in
whispers. Rose said nothing. Her face too was upturned. She was
looking at the umb