It was this manner of delicate calm, considered with her bright eyes and hot cheeks, that, when she joined the party at luncheon, instantly got Longacre’s attention and kept him distracted. She guessed he was trying to explain her mood to himself, without success. She determined to give him no opportunity for discoveries until the hour of her choosing. She quizzed Thair across the luncheon-table with the early invitation to try his automobile he had extended her, and had not made good. “I’ll take you up on that,” he threatened, “if you’ll honor the ‘red devil’ as far as ‘Del Monte’ to-night.” “To the dance? Must we be so precipitate?” she asked. He insisted. Cissy Fitz Hugh looked sharply from Thair to Florence, from Florence to Longacre. After luncheon, while the horses were being brought around, she cornered her cousin. Florence saw Thair amused, protesting,—Cissy positive, insisting. She must have extracted a promise. She turned away with the smile of a kitten over cream. That look, and the idea it suggested, of what Cissy had been after, gave Florence a sudden disgust of the whole thing—Cissy, her manœuver; herself, her own manœuvers; every one; all scuffling after what they wanted, seeing no further than the next minute. Unprofitable! She would not think. She drove back to “Miramar,” as she had come, with Holden. She went immediately to her room. To sleep was impossible, and she would not—no, could not—think. She walked about the room, picked up and moved about little articles on the writing-desk, the chiffonnier. She watched from her window the line of surf that incessantly built and broke itself along the glittering coast. The fingers that drummed the pane trembled. She heard voices passing under her window as the tennis-players and bathers followed the afternoon home for tea on the veranda, since the evening was clear. She did not go down. She stood at the window, watching the violet shadows drawing fold over fold of deepening color across the ocean’s floor. She had lost herself to such finite things as time. When she came back to it with a start, she was dismayed to see only half an hour left for dressing. But she dressed with consideration, with anxiety. For full five minutes after the maid had fastened the last hook and pinned the last flower, she revolved before the mirror, studying the coils of dark hair that wrapped her head, and the lines of the lace gown that sloped along her shoulders and rippled, with broken glitters of cut steel, to the floor. When she turned from the glass she was smiling. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V THE PURSUER IS CAPTURED SHE was late to a late dinner. She found herself last, but felt herself more looked at than mere lateness warranted. Some of the women looked first at her, and then at each other.