io-flash
from the man's inner fire.

All these things Honor Desmond noted; and, by the searchlight of her
womanhood, discerned more than Quita herself had yet realised.

Garth, from his uncoveted post of honour at Mrs Mayhew's left hand,
noted them also; but with less of understanding. Stung to irritation
by a sense of vague happenings in which he counted for nothing, and by
the fact that Quita was evidently enjoying herself far more than the
occasion seemed to warrant, he was in no mood to do justice to the
supreme event of the day--his dinner. Strange foods, too, were an
abomination to his clockwork order of mind; and when, in addition, he
found himself condemned to eat them sitting cross-legged on the ground,
a leaf balanced precariously on one knee, he began to entertain grave
doubts as to the comparative values of the game and the candle.

He quite resented the manifest contentment of Elsie Mayhew and her
partner, who sat facing him, absorbed in the low-toned talk of
incipient lovers, blind and deaf to the insignificant doings around
them. Nor was he greatly blest in his left-hand partner, Bathurst, the
Rajah's tutor--a clean-limbed athlete of the two-adjective genus, who
discoursed complacently of "bags," "mounts," and handicaps; the staple
topics of his kind. And while the stream of words flowed on, unchecked
by his flagrant inattention, Garth's ears were tantalised by snatches
of talk from the lively end of the table, where Desmond and Quita were
behaving like two children; by the silver quality of her laughter that
whipped his senses, while it lulled his conscience like a narcotic, and
set him devising a moonlight stroll with her later on, in the Palace
courtyard, by way of compensation for present martyrdom endured on her
account. For since the night of the dance she had been so uniformly
gracious, that he was beginning to regard his rebuff on Dynkund as
little more than a delicate prelude to surrender after all.

Such absorbing reflections made him so neglectful of his hostess, that
the little lady's spasmodic efforts to enliven him with spiced snippets
of gossip--more than one item of which had emanated from
himself--fizzled out dismally, long before the meal was over; and it
was with an audible sigh of relief that she glanced across at Mrs
Desmond, and got upon her feet with as much dignity as a cushion, a
plump figure, and cramped limbs would allow.

"What? You do not desert us?" Quita asked, as