Caroline Childers interrupted. "You are a hopeless Jingo, my dear Marchesa," she said. "Let us go and see the regattas."
CHAPTER VII—THE COUNSEL OP WISDOM
The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the yacht. When the small boat came alongside the Duke asked to be allowed to take the oars, and so the two had gone alone to see the regattas.
The bay was full of crafts. The crews of rival yachts crowded along the course. Small boats were packed together in an almost unbroken line; one coming late could find no place.
Everywhere awnings, flags, gay parasols shut out the view of the regattas. The Duke pulled out into the bay and north toward Loch Lynne. He was rather glad of the pressing crowd. This young girl held his interest; the enigma of her puzzled him; she was like no other woman. Somehow this dark-eyed, dark-haired girl seemed to present to him the alluring aspect of something newly come into the world; something which he himself had found.
There seemed to lie about her, like a vague perfume, something of the compelling lure of fairy women, called up by the fancy; of women dreamed of; of women created by the mind to satisfy every hunger of the senses. The Duke of Dorset could not regard this girl without this vague illusion entering his body like the first faint subtle odors of a garden. The illusion seemed constantly to attend her. The presence of others, commonplace surroundings, did not remove it. Her conversation, no matter how it ran, did not remove it. He seemed unable by any act of his will to dispel it.
There seemed, somehow, from the first moment, a certain intimate relation existing between himself and this girl whom he had found; as though she had appeared, obedient to some call issuing unconsciously from the mysterious instincts of his nature. The sense of it had entered the man at once when he came before her, as the subtle, compelling influence of some pictures enter and seize our attention when we approach them. And he had wished to stop and receive it. He had gone about under the vague spell of it. When he had been shown over the yacht, he had felt a certain difficulty in giving the attention to the details of that exquisite craft which a proper courtesy required. Afterwards on the deck he had hardly followed the conversation. He had wished to be left alone, to be undisturbed, as one wishes to be undisturbed before the picture that moves him.
He pulled the little boat out into the sea. He drew beyond the yachts, beyond the warship, off the great rock that rises out of the green water north of the bay. He wished to be alone with this girl. He wished to inquire of her, as one would inquire of a fairy woman found in some sunlit hollow; to ask her intimate and personal questions. Without being conscious of it, his conversation entered this avenue of inquiry. He seized upon the Marchesa Soderrelli as one who might lead the way.