The men looked as if they had heard the suggestion and heartily approved of it.

The next evening Ella was fortunate enough to get beside Herbert once again—­she had scarcely had an opportunity of exchanging a word with him all day.  He had been with Phyllis alone in the Canadian canoe.  It only held two comfortably, otherwise——­But no one had volunteered to put its capacity to the test.  Ella had gone in one of the punts with four or five of her guests; but the punt never overtook the canoe.  It was those of the guests who had been in the punt that afterward said it was very funny to observe the chagrin of Queen Guinevere when she found that her Sir Lancelot had discovered an Elaine.

“You have had a delightful day, I’m sure,” said Ella.  She had found him at the bottom of the garden just before dinner.  It was not for her he was loitering there.

“Delightful?  Perhaps.  I shall know more about it ten years hence,” he replied.

“You are almost gruff as well as unintelligible,” said she.

“I beg your pardon,” he cried.  “Pray forgive me, Ella.”

“I’ll forgive your gruffness if you make yourself intelligible,” said she.  “You frighten me.  Ten years hence?  What has happened to-day?”

“Oh, nothing whatever has happened! and as for ten years hence—­well, in ten years hence I shall be looking back to this day either as one of the happiest of my life, or as Francesca looked back upon her tempo felice.”

“Oh, now that you get into a foreign language you are quite intelligible.  You have not spoken?”

“Spoken?  I?  To her—­to her?  I have not spoken.  I don’t believe that I shall ever have the courage to speak to her in the sense you mean.”

Ella smiled as she settled a rose on the bodice of her evening dress—­its red petals were reposing in that little interspace that dimpled the soft shell-pink of her bosom.  The man before her had once kissed her.

She smiled, as she knew that he was watching her.  She wondered if he had forgotten that kiss.

“Why should you lose courage at this juncture?” she asked.  “She hasn’t, up to the present, shown any very marked antipathy to you, so far as I can see.  She is certainly not wanting in courage, if you are.”

“Ella,” he cried, but in a low voice, “Ella, when I look at her, when I think of her, I feel inclined to throw my bag into a trap and get back to town—­get back to New Guinea with as little delay as possible.”

“You would run away?” said she, still smiling.  She had begun to work with the rose in her bosom once more.  “You would run away?  Well, you ran away once before, you know.”

She could not altogether keep the sneer out of her voice; she could not quite deprive her words of their sting.  They sounded to her own ears like the hiss of a lash in the air.  She was amazed at the amount of bitterness in her voice—­amazed and ashamed.