e smiled to
himself furtively under the moustache he bit.

And then he had seen Vera looking at him.

For a moment she had looked at him, with wide, grave eyes that
stayed wide until she turned her head away suddenly.

And the lady, who was the cause of it all, had got up and removed
herself, softly and, for her, inconspicuously, taking her two men
with her out into the garden and the night.

Of course he had understood Vera. He had seen that it was jealousy,
feminine jealousy. And that was why, in the drawing-room afterward,
he had hurried up with his proposal, to make it all straight.

And she had refused him without giving any reasons. She had gone off
to Nice by the one-forty-four train with the de Vignolles, Paul and
Agatha and Ninon and Odette; she had left him in the great, gay,
exotic hotel above the palm trees, above the rose and ivory town,
above the sea; left him alone with the loveliness that made him mad
and miserable; left him cooling his heels on the veranda, under the
gaze, the distinctly interested gaze, of the beautiful and
hypothetical stranger.

II

How beautiful she was he realized after a dinner which figured in
his memory as one of those dinners which he had not enjoyed, though
as a matter of fact he _had_ enjoyed it or the mere distraction of
it. By way of distraction he had taken the table next to hers,
facing her where she sat between her two men.

She was an American; that fact had at first made his doubt itself a
little dubious. And she was probably from the South (they were
different there). Hence her softness, her full tone, her richness
and her glow. Hence her exotic strain that went so well with the
false tropics of the scene. But whether she were a provincial or an
urban, or, as she seemed, a cosmopolitan splendor, Thesiger was not
cosmopolitan enough to tell. She might have been the supreme flower
of her astounding country. She might have been, for all he knew,
unique.

She was tall, and her body, large and massive, achieved the grace of
slenderness from the sheer perfection of its lines. Her attire,
within the bounds of its subservience to Paris, was certainly
unique. It was wonderful the amount of decoration she could carry
without being the worse for it. Her head alone, over and above its
bronze hair, coil on coil and curl on curl, sustained several large
tortoise-shell pins, a gold lace fillet, and a rose over each ear.
It was no more to her than a bit of black ribbon