t, lighted lounge behind her where
the men were sitting. She had found a corner out of sight of its wide
windows. She knew that Kitty Tailleur was in there somewhere. She could
hear her talking to the men. At the other end of the veranda the old
lady sat with her knitting. From time to time she looked up over her
needles and glanced curiously at Miss Keating.

On the lawn below, Colonel Hankin walked with his wife. They kept the
same line as the Lucys, so that, in rhythmic instants, the couples made
one group. There was an affinity, a harmony in their movements as they
approached each other. They were all obviously nice people, people who
belonged by right to the same group, who might approach each other
without any impropriety.

Miss Keating wondered how long it would be before Kitty Tailleur would
approach Mr. Lucy. That afternoon, on her arrival, she had approached
the Colonel, and the Colonel had got up and gone away. Kitty had then
laughed. Miss Keating suspected her of a similar social intention with
regard to the younger man. She knew his name. She had looked it up in
the visitors' book. (She was always looking up people's names.) She had
made with determination for the table next to him. Miss Keating, in the
dawn of their acquaintance, had prayed that Mrs. Tailleur might not
elect to sit next anybody who was not nice. Latterly she had found
herself hoping that their place might not be in view of anybody who was.

For three months they had been living in hotels, in horrifying
publicity. Miss Keating dreaded most the hour they had just passed
through. There was something terrible to her in their entry, in their
passage down the great, white, palm-shaded, exotic room, their threading
of the ways between the tables, with all the men turning round to stare
at Kitty Tailleur. It was all very well for Kitty to pretend that she
saved her by thus diverting and holding fast the public eye. Miss
Keating felt that the tail of it flicked her unpleasantly as she
followed in that troubled, luminous wake.

It had not been quite so unbearable in Brighton, at Easter, when the big
hotels were crowded, and Mrs. Tailleur was not so indomitably
conspicuous. Or else Miss Keating had not been so painfully alive to
her. But Southbourne was half empty in early June, and the Cliff Hotel,
small as it was, had room for the perfect exhibition of Mrs. Tailleur.
It gave her wide, polished spaces and clean, brilliant backgrounds,
yards of p