All this, occupied some minutes, and gave Lesbia and the Cuban just time for a few words that had to be said somehow.

‘Good-night,’ said Montesma, as they clasped hands; ‘good-night;’ and then in a lower voice he said, ’Well, have you decided at last?  Shall it be?’

She looked at him for a moment or so, pale in the starlight, and then murmured an almost inaudible syllable.

‘Yes.’

He bent quickly and pressed his lips upon her gloved hand, and when Mr. Smithson looked round they two were standing apart, Montesma in a listless attitude, as if tired of waiting for his host.

It was Smithson who handed Lesbia into the boat and arranged her wraps, and hung over her tenderly as he performed those small offices.

‘Now really,’ he asked, just before the boat put off, ’when are we to be with you to-morrow?’

’Lady Kirkbank says not till afternoon tea, but I think you may come a few hours earlier.  I am not at all sleepy.’

‘You look as if you needed sleep badly,’ answered Smithson.  ’I’m afraid you are not half careful enough of yourself.  Good-night.’

The boat was gliding off, the oars dipping, as he spoke.  How swiftly it shot from his ken, flashing in and out among the yachts, where the lamps were burning dimly in that clear radiance of new-born day.

Montesma gave a tremendous yawn as he took out his cigar-case, and he and Mr. Smithson did not say twenty words between them during the walk to Formosa, where servants were sitting up, lamps burning, a great silver tray, with brandy, soda, liqueurs, coffee, in readiness.

CHAPTER XLIII.

‘ALAS, FOR SORROW IS ALL THE END OF THIS’

Lady Kirkbank retired to her cabin directly she got on board the Cayman.

‘Good-night, child!  I am more than half asleep,’ she said; ’and I think if there were to be an earthquake an hour hence I should hardly hear it.  Go to your berth directly, Lesbia; you look positively awful.  I have seen girls look bad after balls before now, but I never saw such a spectre as you look this morning.’

Poor Georgie’s own complexion left something to be desired.  The Blanc de Fedora had been a brilliant success for the first two hours:  after that the warm room began to tell upon it, and there came a greasiness, then a streakiness, and now all that was left of an alabaster skin was a livid patch of purplish paint here and there, upon a crow’s-foot ground.  The eyebrows, too, had given in, and narrow lines of Vandyke brown meandered down Lady Kirkbank’s cheeks.  The frizzy hair had gone altogether wrong, and had a wild look, suggestive of the witches in Macbeth, and the scraggy neck and poor old shoulders showed every year of their age in the ghastly morning light.

Lesbia waited in the saloon till Lady Kirkbank had bolted herself into her cabin, and then she went up to the deck wrapped in her satin-lined, fur-bordered cloak, and coiled herself in a bamboo arm-chair, and nestled her bare head into a Turkish pillow, and tried to sleep, there with the cool morning breeze blowing upon her burning forehead, and the plish-plash of seawater soothing her ear.