Then his reflections were interrupted by a sound somewhere below the balcony.
It was the sound of his own side-door being very cautiously opened. He could hear it perfectly clearly in the still night; but whether the door was being opened from the outside or the inside he could not tell. He remembered that, though he had bolted and locked the front-door, he had utterly forgotten the side-door. He leaned over the balcony as far as he dared, but even so he could catch no glimpse of anything in the obscurity beneath.
And then there were steps on the gravel, and he saw a white blur moving on the top of a dark mass. In another moment he perceived that the apparition was Juliette, with a white shawl wrapped round her head. What was she doing there, and why had she opened the door so cautiously? Had she some secret? He decided to watch her. She moved to the middle of the avenue between the two houses and hesitated. And then the great clock in the tower of the Exposition Palace tolled the hour of twelve solemnly, as it were warningly, over the immense extent of the sleeping City of Pleasure.
The appeal of the clock seemed to Carpentaria to be almost dramatic. He felt strongly that he could not spy upon Juliette, that he could not be disloyal to this affectionate companion of his life, and honourably he called out to her:
“Juliette, what are you doing?”
His own voice startled him. It was so clear and penetrative in the gloom.
There was a slight pause. Then Juliette replied: “Carlos, you seem bent on frightening me tonight. I thought you were in bed and asleep. You’ll take cold on that balcony. I only came out to get a little air.”
The notion struck him that her head was turned directly to Ham’s house, and yet she made no comment on the light there and the door ajar.
“Go in, there’s a good girl,” said Carpentaria. “It’s you who’ll be taking cold.”
“I’m going in,” she answered.