red off slowly, leaving a promise
that she would dine with them that evening. She did not know why she
promised. As she walked away, sauntering, because her feet seemed as
lead-laden as her heart, she told herself that it would be better to go
and dine with the sharks in Table Bay than sit down again with Ronald
Kenna. In her room she lay exhausted and very still for a long time,
with the feeling that she had escaped from a red-hot gridiron. She
looked in her mirror on entering, expecting to see a vision of Medusa,
hair hanging in streaks, eyes distraught, and deep ruts in the cheeks;
but her face was charming and composed, and a fixed smile curved her
mouth. She shuddered at her own image.

"Lies deform and obscure the soul," she thought, "yet my face bears no
mark of the lies I have told this afternoon, nor the hell my spirit has
passed through!"

Only when she removed her hat something strange arrested her attention,
something that might have been a feather or a flake of snow lying on
her luminous black hair just where it grew low in a widow's peak at the
centre of her forehead. She made to brush it lightly away, but it
stayed, for it was not a feather at all, but a lock of her own hair
that had turned white. A little gift from Ronald Kenna!

He had played with her as a cat plays with a mouse before killing it.
True, he had not killed her, nor (which would have been the same thing)
exposed her mercilessly before Vereker Sarle's eyes. But he had made
her pay for his clemency. Probably the cleverness with which she
slipped out of the corners into which she was hedged, her skill in
darting from under his menacing paw, roused his admiration as well as
his sporting instinct. It must have been a great game for him, but
hers were the breathless emotions of the helpless mouse whose heart
goes pit-a-pat in the fear of being gobbled up the next moment.

It was all very subtle. Sarle never suspected what was going on, so
cool and sweet she looked under her shady hat, so unfailing was her
composure. He was accustomed to the dry and biting flavour of Kenna's
speech, and paid no great heed to it. He believed himself listening to
the witty reminiscences of two people with many friends and interests
in common, and nothing in the girl's manner as she lied and fenced and
swiftly covered up mistakes with jests and laughter betrayed the agony
of baiting she was enduring. Kenna was a friend he would have trusted
with ev