ead a bit."

She found a novel and an easy-chair, and made deliberate efforts to
tranquillise herself. Soon Rose heard sighs and phews, and sudden
rustlings and slappings, and then the bang of a book upon the floor.

"I can't read! and the light brings the mosquitoes. It's too hot in
here. I'm going out to get cool, Rosie."

"A'right," mumbled drowsy Rose. And the light was extinguished, and the
blind of the French window rattled up.

Deb flung both leaves wide--like all the Redford doors, they were never
locked or barred--and drifting over the verandah, sat down on the edge
of it, with her feet on the gravel. She had tossed off her pearl
necklace and a breast-knot of wilted roses; otherwise, she sat in full
evening dress, and the night air bathed her bare neck and arms. Also
the mosquitoes found them--a delicious morsel!--so that she had to turn
her lacy skirt up over her head to be quite comfortable. From under
this hood the dark lamps of her eyes shone forth, gazing steadily into
the dim world--into the bit of future that she thought she saw
unveiled. The loom of the trees, the glimmer of flowering bushes, the
open spaces of lawn and pallid pathways, the translucent blue-green
sky, the rising moon--these things made the picture, but were to all
intents invisible to the inward sight. She really saw nothing, until
suddenly a pin-point spark appeared out of the shadows, moved along a
hedge of laurels, and fixed itself in the neighbourhood of a distant
garden-seat. Then at once she stiffened like a cat that has heard a
mouse squeak or a bird's wing rustle; she was alert on the instant,
concentrated upon the phenomenon. Instinct recognised the tip of a
cigar which had the handsome face of Claud Dalzell behind it.

"What is he doing out of doors at this time of night?" she wondered;
and the little star began to draw her like a magnet. The world becomes
another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws--or
rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day
Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in
this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of
her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the
moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent
lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts
cultivated for her guidance by generations of wise men, now, all in a
moment, came thi