With no blush on her face, but with a glow of passionate love in her eyes, she raised her face, looked into his for a moment, then kissed him.
Then they turned, and went toward the boat; but this time she clung to his arm, and her head nestled on his shoulder. As they turned, something white and ghost-like moved from behind the trees, in front of which they had been standing.
It stood in the moonlight looking after them, itself so white and eerie that it might have been one of the good fairies; but that in its face—beautiful enough for any fairy—there glittered the white, angry, threatening look of an evil spirit.
Was it the nearness of this exquisitely-graceful figure in white which by some instinct Stella had felt and been alarmed at?
The figure watched them for a moment until they were out of sight, then it turned and struck into a path leading toward the Hall.
As it did so, another figure—a black one this time—came out of the shadow, and crossed the path obliquely.
She turned and saw a white, not unhandsome, face, with small keen eyes bent on her. She, the watcher, had been watched.
For a moment she stood as if half-tempted to speak, but the next drew the fleecy shawl round her head with a gesture of almost insolent hauteur.
But she was not to escape so easily; the dark, thin figure slipped back, and stooping down picked up the handkerchief, which in her sweeping gesture she had let drop.