She smiled and was gone, the brief adieu leaving each of them to wonder how much more was meant than the polite commonplaces uttered.
Roger leaned out of his own window for ten minutes smoking, his mind full of a pleasant excitement. Disturbing, too, for with the unaccustomed feeling that perhaps at last he had found a girl he was willing to let himself fall in love with came a doubt, a cautious warning to hesitate, not to go too fast. She was delightful, he firmly believed her to be transparent and sincere, but men have been taken in only too easily when their senses have been stirred as his had been to-night. No, he must not rush things; he must wait a little and be sure, not so much of himself as of her; he must be convinced that she cared for him, that she was not merely dazzled by what he could give her one day…. That was the drawback of having money, if only in prospect. Already, for some years in fact, he had been pursued by mercenary maidens and their mothers. He had a rooted aversion to the whole breed, and a latent fear that one day he would be taken in after all. He knew himself to be impressionable and impulsive; still, behind these dangerous qualities lay a certain hard, deliberate common sense that had saved him in more than one perilous situation. Sternly he informed himself that he had known Esther Rowe about three days. In short, he must not be a fool.
Something, the champagne perhaps, had made him very thirsty. Finding his bottle of Evian water almost empty, he decided to explore the kitchen region below to secure another. He knew where the mineral waters were kept—in a small cupboard next to the wine-cellar. He sallied forth and descended the back stairs very quietly, in order not to disturb anyone. After poking about for a few moments he found what he wanted. There was nothing to open it with, however. Where was the thing kept? Ah, of course, in the sideboard, he remembered.
The swing-door into the dining-room made no noise; he discovered the little implement in the drawer with the table-knives and, wrenching off the metal cap from the bottle, turned to go back the way he had come. All at once he stopped stock-still and listened. Then he glanced towards the door that led into the drawing-room. Had he heard whispered voices?
For thirty seconds he remained rooted to the spot, his ears strained to catch a repetition of the fancied sound. It had been only a faint murmur; he might have been mistaken … yes, there it was again, a sort of choked, sibilant whisper coming from the adjoining room. Hardly had he made sure of it when there fell on his ears a small crash, sharp, as of some object dropped on the parquet. It was followed by a smothered exclamation in a man's voice, brief and profane.
With but one idea in his mind—burglars—he crossed to the drawing-room door and flung it wide. That he was unarmed did not enter his thoughts.
The drawing-room was in utter darkness. He reached for the nearby switch and flooded the room in a blaze of light.
CHAPTER XVIII
About an hour before this Arthur Holliday left the Restaurant des Ambassadeurs and, with a slight frown on his face, got into his car and drove rapidly to La Californie. When he reached the Villa Firenze all was in darkness. He left his car in a turning out of the main road, then quietly slipped into the garden and walked across the grass around to the paved terrace at the side of the salon. As he set foot on the flat stones the doors opened softly and Thérèse Clifford put out her hands and drew him inside.
"Ah, I thought you would never come!" she sighed a little fretfully, standing for a moment with her whole body against his.