He poured out these words in a hot lava-torrent of passionate emotion which surprised and moved the woman to whom sensations were the breath of life. However, she was not conquered; she looked up in his face and said with languid insolence: “So! One can make fire out of wood at last! Well, you should have woke up sooner. I intend to see my daughter.” George heard the patter of Nouna’s steps on the polished floor of the room within. With one rapid glance at the window, which was some few feet further down the verandah than the spot where he stood, and without one word or sound to warn her of his intention, he snatched Chloris up in his arms, and ran across the lawn towards the river in a slanting direction away from the window, to a spot where he saw a couple of boats moored to the bank. Utterly taken by surprise, and as instinctively submissive as her sex usually are to a masculine _coup_ of this kind, Chloris White scarcely uttered a faint exclamation until, seeing the direction of their course, she asked, coolly: “Are you going to drown me?” “No. Though it’s what you deserve,” he panted briefly. And reaching the boats, he got into the nearest, a solidly built skiff, put Chloris down on the cushioned seat in the stern, pushed the boat off, and paddled her easily with the tide to the shadow of the trees, so that Nouna, if she came to the window, might not see them. “What do you expect to gain by this astonishing stratagem?” asked Chloris. “I intend to prevent you seeing Nouna until she has got clear of the house.” “In the meantime young Wood will have met her, she will have found out that Chloris White is at home, and will have made up her mind to wait until she does see me.” George made no answer. He was indeed considering what step he should next take. Luckily for him his silence, which was really the result of want of resource, impressed Chloris White differently. She was not used to being thwarted and treated as a person of small account, and she grew impatient and fretful at being made a fool of. To be forced to sit, with a complexion adapted for the half-light of the verandah and the lamps of the dinner table, in the full yellow glare of the evening sun, hatless, with no becoming sunshade to throw a soft shadow over her face, exposed without any of the clever artifices of her treasury to the disillusionised stare of the pleasure-crews that rowed past, was an ordeal which subdued the haughty security of this queen of an artificial realm more surely than innocent George could have guessed. She looked up at him, blinking in the unaccustomed strong daylight, with a malignant expression of spiteful hatred, and then looked over the boat-side into the shallow water, cowering miserably before the combined forces of blunt, coarse, overmastering nature, and blunt, coarse, overmastering man. “Well, you have got your way this once--make the most of it,” she said bitterly. “Let me get back on the bank; the sun makes my head ache.”