their seating.

"If I had known an hour before!" he said to himself, and the astounding
idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to
spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering
of food.

However, the harm was done now. There was Luttrell already seated at the
end against the balustrade. He had the noise of a Babel of tongues and
the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the
stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below
the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers
in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness
and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each
of them, sat Stella Croyle.

"I should have separated them," Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised
and drank his cocktail. "But how the deuce could I without making
everybody stare? This party wasn't got up to separate people. All the
same----"

The hushed wonder of a summer night. The gaiety of a bright thronged
restaurant! In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable
antagonist. But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by
nature, the seduction of both!

"Poor devil, he won't have a dog's chance!" the baronet concluded; and
he watched approvingly what appeared to him to be Luttrell's endeavour
to avoid joining battle on this unfavourable field. He could only trust
feebly in that and in the strength of the "something else," the secret