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And then—directly in front of his eyes, like a lowly caterpillar shedding its cocoon—Elinor Dalrymple metamorphosed into the most glorious painted lady he had ever been privileged to see!
He could feel his body responding to the stimuli of Elly’s appearance, to the sweet violet scent of her hair as it billowed in the breeze off the Channel, to the moist sweetness of her mouth as she smiled up at him with all the guileless invitation of a first-time strumpet.
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Lifting a hand to his face, he touched a considerable growth of beard, which told him that he had been in the cottage a long time—although how he had gotten here, he could not remember. As a matter of fact, the last thing he did remember was taking the air on the deck of his yacht, the Lark, as it lay at anchor just off Folkestone.
Before setting sail he had endured a rather boring, if profitable, evening onshore at cards, his three casually met companions having proved to be as dull-witted at faro as they were in the art of conversation, so that it had not bothered him overmuch that he had pushed away from the table the big winner, leaving the other gentlemen to commiserate with one another over their collective run of bad luck.
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