It was upon the evening of this day, after Mr. and Mrs. Blagden had been duly rice-pelted and entrained, that I first talked against John Charteris. The novelist was, as has been said, a cousin of Peter Blagden, and as such, was one of the wedding guests at Bellemeade; and that evening, well toward midnight, the little man, midway in the consumption of one of his interminable cigarettes, happened to come upon me seated upon the terrace and gazing, rather vacantly, in the direction of the moon.
I was not thinking of anything in particular; only there was a by-end of verse which sang itself over and over again, somewhere in the back of my brain--"Her eyes were the eyes of a bride whom delight makes afraid, her eyes were the eyes of a bride"--and so on, all over again, as at night a traveller may hear his train jogging through a monotonous and stiff-jointed song; and in my heart there was just hunger.
