Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/139

 proposed elevating Delight to the position she now held. He wanted to regard her as his own creation and he resented the gimlet gaze of the Scotsman that seemed forever fixed on him. He felt as the ring-master in a circus putting a beautiful filly through her paces, snapping the whip at the right moment, bowing for her to the plaudits of the crowd.

But, if Bastien were comparable to the ring-master of a circus, Kirke was as a high priest at the altar of a goddess, a priest rather contemptuous towards the poor young goddess herself, but demanding the worship of others with fierce austerity.

When Delight beat the Chinese gong before the door of the dining-room with calculated fervour, ascending from a low, muffled tapping to a thunder that filled the house, his angular body would invariably be draped against the newel post while his hungry light eyes devoured her unconscious beauty. When she lowered the gong, her lips parted in a pleased smile, he always gave his short barking laugh, and looked about him with a kind of snarl to see whether homage were forthcoming.

He said nothing except perhaps to mutter to his friend, Lovering: "A fine geerl." His mind was made up that she should come to no harm through Bastien.

Kirke was annoyed by Edwin Silk's sudden affluence. It angered him to see Silk sought after where he had once been jeered at, and though he was willing to let Silk pay for his drinks, he never hung about him. He despised Silk for taking a kitchen girl rowing on the lagoon. With his education he might have picked up a lass worth while, if he could only have kept sober.

However, luck was to come his own way before the summer was over. His mother died in Dundee and left him a comfortable sum, not so much as Silk had got by