He replied simply, “I don’t like him; and I remember saying so.”

“It is strange,” she said, “that Gerald does.”

Selwyn looked at the illuminated yacht. . . .  “I wonder whether any of Neergard’s crowd is expected ashore here.  Do you happen to know?”

She did not know.  A moment later, to his annoyance, Edgerton Lawn came up and asked her to dance; and she went with a smile and a whispered:  “Wait for me—­if you don’t mind.  I’ll come back to you.”

It was all very well to wait for her—­and even to dance with her after that; but there appeared to be no peace for him in prospect, for Scott Innis came and took her away, and Gladys Orchil offered herself to him very prettily, and took him away; and after that, to his perplexity and consternation, a perfect furor for him seemed to set in and grow among the younger set, and the Minster twins had him, and Hilda Innis appropriated him, and Evelyn Cardwell, and even Mrs. Delmour-Carnes took a hand in the badgering.

At intervals he caught glimpses of Eileen through the gay crush around him; he danced with Nina, and suggested to her it was time to leave, but that young matron had tasted just enough to want more; and Eileen, too, was evidently having a most delightful time.  So he settled into the harness of pleasure and was good to the pink-and-white ones; and they told each other what a “dear” he was, and adored him more inconveniently than ever.

Truly enough, as he had often said, these younger ones were the charmingly wholesome and refreshing antidote to the occasional misbehaviour of the mature.  They were, as he also asserted, the hope and promise of the social fabric of a nation—­this younger set—­always a little better, a little higher-minded than their predecessors as the wheel of the years slowly turned them out in gay, eager, fearless throngs to teach a cynical generation the rudiments of that wisdom which blossoms most perfectly in the hearts of the unawakened.

Yes, he had frequently told himself all this; told it to others, too.  But, now, the younger set, en masse and in detail, had become a little bit cramponne—­a trifle too all-pervading.  And it was because his regard for them, in the abstract, had become centred in a single concrete example that he began to find the younger set a nuisance.  But others, it seemed, were quite as mad about Eileen Erroll as he was; and there seemed to be small chance for him to possess himself of her, unless he were prepared to make the matter of possession a pointed episode.  This he knew he had no right to do; she had conferred no such privilege upon him; and he was obliged to be careful of what he did and said lest half a thousand bright unwinking eyes wink too knowingly—­lest frivolous tongues go clip-clap, and idle brains infer that which, alas! did not exist except in his vision of desire.

The Hither Woods had been hung with myriads of lanterns.  From every branch they swung in clusters or stretched away into perspective, turning the wooded aisles to brilliant vistas.  Under them the more romantic and the dance-worn strolled in animated groups or quieter twos; an army of servants flitted hither and thither, serving the acre or so of small tables over each of which an electric cluster shed yellow light.