After lunch they sat and smoked, leaning over the great clear view. They could hear the distant velvety boom of the village clock beneath them. Winn gripped his hand firmly on the table. "I've got to damned well do it," he said to himself. He remembered that he had had once to shoot a spy in cold blood, and that he used those words to himself before he did it. A couple passed close to their table. The woman was over-dressed, and hung with all kinds of jingling chains and bangles; she was pretty, and as she sat with her profile turned a little toward them she was curiously like Estelle. This was his opportunity. It must come now; all the morning it had lain in the back of his mind, behind delight, behind their laughter, like some lurking jungle creature waiting for the dark. "Do you see that woman," he asked Claire, "the pretty one over there by the pillar? She's awfully like--" Claire stopped him. "Pretty!" she cried. "Do you really think she's pretty? I think she's simply loathsome!" Winn checked himself hurriedly; he obviously couldn't finish his sentence with "she's awfully like my wife." "Well, she sets out to be pretty, doesn't she?" he altered it rather lamely. Claire continued extremely scornful. "Yes, I dare say," she admitted. "She may set out to be smart too, hung round with things like a Christmas-tree, but she's as common as a sixpenny bazaar. I'll tell you why I don't like her, Major Staines, and who she reminds me of, but perhaps you think her pretty, too? I mean that horrid woman, Mrs. Bouncing in our hotel?" "But can't horrid women be pretty, too?" Winn ventured with meekness. "No, of course not," said Claire, with great decisiveness. "Why, you know horrid men can't be handsome. Look at Mr. Roper!" Winn was uncertain if this point of knowledge had ever reached him; but he wasn't at this time of day going to look at Mr. Roper, so he gave in. "I dare say you're right," he said. "As a matter of fact, you know, I never _do_ look at Roper." "But that's not the reason," Claire went on, slightly softened by her victory, "that I dislike her. I really dislike her because I think she is bad for Maurice; but perhaps you haven't noticed the way he keeps hanging about her. It makes me sick." Winn admitted that he had noticed it. "Still," he said, "of course if you hadn't proved to me that by being horrid she couldn't be pretty, I should have supposed that he simply hung about Mrs. Bouncing because she was--well, not precisely plain." Claire looked doubtfully at him, but he wasn't smiling; he was merely looking at her with sufficient attention. "There are only two of us," she said in a low voice, "Maurice and me, and I do so awfully want him to be a success. I don't think anybody else does. I don't even know how much he wants it himself. You see, Maurice is so young in many ways, and our people having died--he hasn't had much of a chance, has he? Men ought to have fathers."