gnoring the allusion to her devoted if
irascible escort. "Dance music always makes one rather sad--don't you
think so? It seems to ache with everything one wants and hasn't got; and
the ache goes on.--I turned homesick for--for India, and for my green
jade elephant I used to love so dreadfully much.--I've all that is left
of him, still wrapped in the same rice paper in the same sandalwood box
you brought him in, put away with my best treasures in my own room at
The Hard."

She came nearer, stood beside him, bending down a little as she rested
her hands on the top of the iron balustrade of the verandah, while her
eyes followed the curve of the bay to where the lighthouse rose, a
black column with flashing headpiece, above the soft glitter of the
moonlit sea.

"And homesick, Colonel Sahib, for you," she said.

"For me?" he exclaimed almost involuntarily, roughly startled out of his
partially recovered tranquillity and ease.

"Yes"--she said, looking up at him. "Isn't that quite natural, since
you have stepped in so often to help me when things have gone rather
wrong?--I knew you must be somewhere quite close by. I sort of felt
you were there. And you were there--weren't you? Why did you hide
yourself away?"

Carteret could not bring himself immediately to answer. He was perplexed,
infinitely charmed, distrustful, all at once--distrustful, though for
very different reasons, both of himself and of her.

"Are things, then, going rather wrong now?" he asked presently.

For he judged it wise to accept her enigmatic speech according to its
most simple and obvious interpretation. By so doing he stood, moreover,
to gain time; and time in his existing perplexity appeared to him of
cardinal importance.

"That's just what I'm not sure about." Damaris spoke slowly, gravely, her
glance again fixed upon the beacon light set for the safety of passing
ships on the further horn of the bay. "If I could be sure, I should know
what to do--know whether it is right to keep on as--as I am. Do you see?"

But what, at this juncture, Carteret did, in point of fact, most
consciously see was the return of Henrietta Frayling's scattered guests,
from the Pavilion and other less fully illuminated quarters, towards the
main building of the hotel. From the improvised ball-room within chords
struck on the piano and answering tuning of strings invited to the
renewal of united and active festivity. In the face of consequently
impending interrupti