After that first meeting in his mother’s house he had found himself thinking of Gita at the most unexpected and inopportune moments. She projected herself abruptly upon his mental retina when he was sterilizing his instruments preparatory to an operation, discussing a case gravely with his chief, taking his brisk morning walk, relaxing his mind at the play, trying to fall asleep. He had been profoundly annoyed, but attributed the phenomenon to her unusual appearance. Those fierce black eyes and extraordinary eyelashes, that spirited head that looked as if it were about to lift her shoulders and fly upward, would probably haunt any man. No doubt she had a personality as remarkable, although she had said nothing he could remember, merely asked a good many questions. But what it might be did not interest him in the least. He would not care if he never met her again. His mind that night had been like an inadvertently exposed plate and the impression it had received would fade in due course. When her unexpected invitation to the Christmas party arrived he had accepted it in the hope that a second meeting would lay the ghost. But when he had entered that great hall lit with pine torches, flaring down on men and women in white wigs and bygone costumes, as gorgeous a scene as even that old manor house, famed for its hospitality in the days of Colonial governors, had ever witnessed, two centuries seemed to drop out of life; and as he stood in the shadow, watching the mock-stately evolutions of the minuet, a fine haze like a golden cobweb stole over his brain, and he had a quiet conviction he had been there before and was here again for some more definite purpose. Earlier, he had half laughed, half frowned at his reflection in the mirror; but even then it had seemed to him his transformation was so complete as to create a doubt if he would be able to shake off this new personality on the morrow. He certainly would never cease to wonder that for one night in his life he had been handsome. The romp that finished the minuet had brought him out of his hallucination and he had moved forward merely to find his hostess and do his first duty as a guest. After that he would look on for a while, enjoying the beauty of the pageant, and then slip out. There was no place in such a scene for him. When he had stood staring for a moment at Gita, hardly knowing what banalities he might be uttering, again with that iridescent cobweb flung over his brain and that curious beating of old memories beneath, his impulse was to flee incontinently. But after a dance with Miss Pleyden, during which he believed that ridiculous illusions had fled forever, he had deliberately sought Gita in the drawing-room, determined to have done with nonsense forthwith.