Erlito hesitated.
“You are very good, Nicholas,” he said. “We are, as you see, playing Badminton, and as a matter of fact we are very much in earnest about this game. Miss Van Decht and I are playing the deciding match with my friends there, Hassen and Brand. Let me find you a chair, and present you to these good people. Afterwards—it will not be long—I shall be wholly at your service; and, Nicholas, if you please, I am Erlito only here. You understand?”
Reist assented gravely, and Erlito turned round. The two players were talking to the girl across the net. An elderly man with grey imperial and smoking a long cigar was leaning back in a deck-chair.
“Miss Van Decht,” Erlito said, turning to her, “will you permit me to present to you my very old friend, the Duke Nicholas of Reist—Miss Van Decht, Mr. Van Decht, Mr. Hassen, Mr. Brand.”
Reist bowed low before the girl, who looked straight into his eyes with a frank and pleasant curiosity. She was largely made, but the long flowing lines of her figure were perfectly and symmetrically graceful. Her features were delicate, but her mouth was delightful—large, shapely and sensitive. Her light brown hair, which showed a disposition to wave, had escaped bounds a little during the violent exercise and had fallen into picturesque disorder. She smiled charmingly at Reist, but said nothing beyond the conventional words of greeting. Then she looked up at Erlito with twinkling eyes.
“Mr. Brand is getting insupportable,” she declared. “He is like all you obstinate Englishmen. He does not know when he is beaten.”
“We will endeavour,” Erlito said, taking up his racquet, “to impress it upon him. There are cigarettes by your side, Reist.”
The girl went to her place at the end of the court.
“This must be the deciding game,” she declared, “for the light is going, and dad is smoking his last cigar. Ready! Serve!”