Her table was well in view. She was with another woman--perhaps younger, a brunette, vivacious--and an elderly man with projecting teeth, and eyes like a fish. Adaile? How grotesque he must have looked making love! He had a nose as long as the one in Blake's portrait of the man who built the Pyramids. And he used to be unkind to her!--one could read that he was a cold-blooded, unappreciative stick.... Now he was talking to her. On second thoughts, perhaps he wasn't her husband--he displayed the projecting teeth to her in so many smiles. The other woman's husband then! Quite a good chap in his way, no doubt. He was doing them very well in the matter of wine. Would there be a chance to speak to her to-night? Abominably hard lines if he had to wait till to-morrow, but he wanted to find her alone--in the garden, for preference, in the moonlight.... No--no--thirty-five; but no more, not an hour. How beautiful she _used to be_! She didn't know she was sitting in the room with a man she had kissed. Rather an amusing reflection that! ... Scores of men in the room, though; perhaps she did. How sick he would have felt to think so once! Where was the splendid jealousy he ought to feel this evening? "'Dead as the bulrushes round little Moses On the old banks of the Nile!'" He made his coffee last till the party got up, and then followed them to the salon. The salon did not keep them--they drifted to the hall. They disappeared. The hall was a bevy of women who had been upstairs to put on hats, and were desiring to be taken to the Kursaal. "Poppa" was in constant demand. Conrad observed that all the family men seemed inclined to loll where they were, and that all the unaccompanied men made sprightly departures. In the concert-room he found her again, but he didn't find his opportunity. To be sure, he had hardly expected one there. Still he felt rather hipped the last thing at night as he sat among a crowd, and the popping of champagne corks, in a buffet where the casks were utilised as seats, and the ladies' toilettes were as gorgeous--and as modest--as the ladies' toilettes in the hotel. In the morning he met her coming back from the sands with an enormous sunshade, in the "early bath" costume; and he met her later wearing a picture hat in the "after bath" costume: also he saw her in the costume she put on when _déjeuner_ was over--and still she was unapproachable. If she proved too elusive, he'd be tempted to swim after her next day and try his luck in the water. But could he be sentimental with his hair dripping? And even in Ostend it wouldn't be--Oh, in the wrong key altogether! She was scribbling on a picture postcard at one of the little writing tables, and there was nobody else there. "May I remind Mrs. Adaile that I have had the happiness of being presented to her?" She turned her head, and there was approval in the lady's gaze. There was, however, not a scintilla of recognition in it.