“And you’ll help me, won’t you?”
“With my advice—yes.”
“Well, that’s all I want. If I win this game, I want to win it square.
“Say, you are sure the goods. You’re as pretty—it wouldn’t be natural for a man to 144 say you’re as pretty as she is, but a man can just look at you and wonder—” and here he dropped one of his hands gently upon hers. She let it rest there a moment before she drew away.
“We’d better be going back,” she said. “They’ll think it’s I and not Eleanor, if we stay so long.”
As they started, he stooped to get her another drink. Standing above him, her hand lifted toward her student beri, she bent her gaze on his back. A peculiar look it was, as though an effort against pain. It faded into an expression like hunger.
CHAPTER VIII
It seemed afterward to Bertram Chester, reviewing the early events of a life in which he was well pleased, that his real attack on things, his virtual beginning, came with that house-party of the Masters’s. The victory of his smile on the staircase he followed up that evening to a general conquest. For Masters, when dinner was over, brewed a hot punch. They drank it about the driftwood fire, and even the severe Marion Slater relaxed and made merry. The essence of the gods strips self-control and delicacy first, so that the finer wit goes by without tribute of a laugh and the wit of poked fingers—especially if it be sauced by personality—rules at the board. After the punch had worked sunshine in them, the poked finger of this young barbarian was more compelling than the sallies of Masters or the mimicry of Harry Banks.