antly, but it fell from his
fingers, and he stood flushed and staring. "You pippin!" he said again.

She belonged in this garden, in the checker of light and shadow and
exotic color, slender like a young bamboo and rounded as a purple
passion fruit. She belonged with the whole affair. She was just the
thing he had been waiting for. He took an unsteady step, and another.
She made no move. She still regarded him as he stayed, swaying. Through
the play of sun-threaded foliage she seemed even to smile, provocative,
as if to mock him for hesitating on his cue; and at that he lost his
head altogether--what was left him. Thrusting aside shrubs and creepers,
he reached for her as he had reached to pluck the rhododendron.

"D'you--d'you come seeking me, m'dear?" he stammered fatuously. "Come
right along, then, you beauty--and gie's a kiss, won't you?"

He did not do it well--in fact by the time he arrived at the gesture he
did it very badly.

* * * * *

Smoking-room audiences that had hung upon the fervid tales of Tunstal,
globe-trotter; his fellow passengers, instructed in speed by the
same--they must have felt somehow cheated if they could have seen him
then. They must have suspected the sad, sad dog, a wolf for theory but a
pug for practice, whose snap and dash in outlandish parts had been
harmless enough after all. There is a technique to such affairs. Even
arrack cannot supply the deficiencies of the amateur--as Tunstal was,
and as he presently knew himself to be....

He recognized her. His arms were about the lithe figure, drawing her
close when he became aware of the clean-carven cameo face so near him.
She was the girl of the cinnabar boat, the girl that had glanced upward
from the evil decks. Yet the shock of discovery was not his chief
reaction, neither amazement at her presence in the garden and her
changed attire. He was looking into her eyes.

They were wide and brown, deep as grotto pools, and strange, with a hint
of obliquity alien to him by untold centuries. But he could read--as
they blazed into his own--he could read their language. Terror was there
and bewilderment. But pride too--pride of soul like the chill purity of
mountain peaks. And from that height she feared and loathed him, the
brutish creature of another race who dared to lay his defiling and
incomprehensible touch upon her.

These things he saw while he stooped, while his lips pressed her bud of
a mouth. For h