hanting smile
to catch his eye. And before he could draw a breath, sat down beside
him.

"What you do here?" she asked in her sweet, twittering voice. "You wait
for somebody, eh?"

"Yes," he answered, rousing, "for you."

"Ah--h!" her eyes snapped under the big brim. "How do I know you only
tell me that because I am here?"

Her hand, gloved in lemon kid, was near his knee and he took it
meditatively, pulling back the wrist of it until she drew away and
removed it herself, smiling.

"Eh?" she demanded, not quite sure if he had caught her drift, so
deliberate was his mood. He took the ring out of his pocket and grasped
her hand while he slid the gem over a finger. She let it rest there for
a moment, studying the situation. No one was near them just then. And
then she looked up right into his face leaning a little towards him. Her
voice caught a little as she spoke. It was ravishing, a ring like that.
For a flicker of an eyelash she was off her guard, and he caught a
smoulder of extraordinary passion in her half-closed eyes.

"You like me," she twittered softly.

The sun had gone, the gray water was ruffled by a little wind, the wind
of evening, and as the guns boomed on the warships in the roadstead the
ensigns came down.

"You like me," she said again, bending over a little more, for his eyes
were watching the ships and she could not bear it. Suddenly he put his
arm across her shoulders and held her. And then he used a strange and
terrible expression.

"I'd go to hell for you," he said.

She leaned back with a sigh of utter content.

CHAPTER X

He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled
and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the
road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and
endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order
while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening,
however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save
return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand
looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight.

She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the
world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so transmute
the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had
passed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose
dreams not only come true but surp