She had been bored during these days at Patjaram, for which she had accepted the invitation to the milling-feast because she had refused it in past years; but now that she saw Addie approaching she was bored no longer. Of course she had known him for years; and she had seen him grow from a child into a boy, into a man; and she had kissed him even as a boy. She had long ago judged him, the tempter. But now, as he came forward with his halo of sunshine, she judged him once more: his comely, slender animalism and the glow of his tempter's eyes in the dusky brown of his young Moorish face; the pouting curves of his lips, formed for kissing, with the young down of his moustache; the tigerish strength and litheness of limbs which Don Juan might have envied: it all dazzled her, made her blink her eyes. As he greeted his mother's visitors and sat down, a volley of wordy gaiety ran round that circle of languid conversation and drowsy thoughts, as though he were casting a handful of his sunshine, of the gold-dust of his temptation over them all, over all those women, mother and sisters and nieces and Doddie and Léonie van Oudijck. Léonie looked at him, as they all looked at him, and her glance fell upon his hands. She could have kissed those hands of his; she suddenly became smitten with the shape of his fingers, with the brown, tigerish strength of the hands themselves: she suddenly became smitten with all the young wild-animal vigour which breathed like a fragrance of manhood from the whole of his boyish frame. She felt her blood throbbing, almost uncontrollably, despite her great art of remaining cool and correct in the circles around the marble tables. But she was no longer bored. She had found an object to fill the next few days. Only ... her blood throbbed so violently that Theo had noticed her blush and the quivering of her eyelids. Enamoured of her as he was, his eyes had penetrated her soul. And, when they rose to go to lunch in the back verandah, where the babus had been squatting, grinding everybody's different admixture of spices with pestles, in little stone mortars, he whispered two words between his teeth: "Take care!"