For a moment Lymond remained there, surveying them. His eight officers, staring edgily back, saw a delicate-looking gentleman in a pretty paned and pinked tunic with the finest voile shirt bands and a link-belt of Italian enamel work. A man whose yellow hair, dry and light and unevenly tipped, eclipsed the sunlight behind him, and whose attic profile and unoccupied, long-shafted hands caused a small moan of ecstasy to burst, very circumspectly, from Mr Hislop's baby-pink lips.