n the prospect of possible explosions.

"Of course," she said, reverting to her vision, "of course he'd have
to."

She looked at Straker with eyes where mischief danced a fling. It
was clear that in that moment she saw Laurence Furnival the profane,
Furnival the scorner of marriage, caught and tied: punished (she
scented in ecstasy the delicate irony of it), so beautifully
punished there where he had sinned.

Straker began to have some idea of the amusement Fanny got out of
her house parties.

For a moment they had no more to say. All around them there was
silence, born of Mrs. Viveash and her brooding, of young Reggy's
trouble with Miss Probyn, and of some queer triangular complication
in the converse of Brocklebank, Lady Paignton, and Mr. Higginson. In
that moment and that pause Straker thought again of Miss Tarrant. It
was, he said to himself, the pause and the moment for her
appearance. And (so right was he in his calculation) she appeared.

II

He saw her standing in the great doorway of the east wing where the
three steps led down on to the terrace. She stood on the topmost
step, poised for her descent, shaking her scarf loose to drift in a
white mist about her. Then she came down the terrace very slowly,
and the measured sweep of her limbs suggested that all her movements
would be accomplished to a large rhythm and with a superb delay.

Her effect (she had not missed it) was to be seen in all its wonder
and perfection on Laurence Furnival's face. Averted suddenly from
Mrs. Viveash, Furnival's face expressed the violence of his shock
and his excitement. It was clear that he had never seen anything
quite like Philippa Tarrant before, and that he found her incredibly
and ambiguously interesting. Ambiguously--no other word did justice
to the complexity of his facial expression. He did not know all at
once what to make of Philippa, and, from further and more furtive
manifestations of Furnival's, Straker gathered that the young man
was making something queer. He had a sort of sympathy with him, for
there had been moments when he himself had not known exactly what to
make. He doubted whether even Fanny Brocklebank (who certainly made
the best of her) had ever really known.

Whatever her inscrutable quality, this year she was, as Fanny had
said, more so than ever. She _was_ stupendous; and that although she
was not strictly speaking beautiful. She had no color in her white
face or in her black hair; she had