corsair of thirty, with flashing
teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He
was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his
looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising
that Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,
Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the long
grass terrace.

Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented
its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table.
Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he
laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the
chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard
it. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him!
He quickened his pace.

In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her
long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent
grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty
regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments
when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its
long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than
a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowler-like
countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,
appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this
dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
bass, passed Anne's other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironic
amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling
now as Denis looked down at her: her cat's smile, he called it, for no
very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it
two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity
of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the
puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and
laughing between the narrowed lids.

The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between
Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.

"How are you, Jenny?" he shouted to her.

Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of
her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.

"How's London been since I went