detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the
hair--two thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.

"A girl, by Jove!" he exclaimed mentally.

It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline of the
shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise by
the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding the
chair on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall. Her
feet, in low white shoes, were crossed prettily.

She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had
the sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of
observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature in
that marked and exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously, as no man
ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where he was. He had
lost touch with his surroundings. The big woman, advancing, concealed
the girl from his sight for a moment. She bent over the seated youthful
figure, in passing it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear.
Her lips did certainly move. But what sort of word could it have been
to make the girl jump up so swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised
into a sympathetic start. He glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking
towards the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the
girl, with the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the
three steps from the platform to the floor of the hall. There she
paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while
the other--the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the
piano--passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre
aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed
Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if
everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met
the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.

Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he
got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him
cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of
Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in
trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.

It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
thinking of Morrison then