"By no manner of means," said Marie. "Stay with me a quarter of an hour or so, and then I shall go back to bed."
"But you are really better?" asked Maud.
"I am really all right; there is no excuse for me at all stealing away like this. I ought to have gone out and talked to people; but I felt lazy and rather tired, and only just came out for a breath of air. It is cooler here; but how hot for midnight! 'In the darkness thick and hot,'" she said half to herself.
Marie lay down in the hammock the girl had vacated, and there was a few moments' silence. Then, "Would it tire you to talk a little, Lady Alston?" she said. "About—you know what about."
"No, dear," said Marie. "And one can always talk best about intimate things in the dark. If one is only a voice one's self, and the other person is only a voice, one can say things more easily. Is it not so?"
Maud drew her chair a little closer to the head of the hammock, so that both were in the dense shade of the lilac-bush. Immediately outside the shadow of the bush beneath which they sat was the pearly grayness of the third of the lawns, on which the moon shone full.
"Yes, it is about him," said Maud. "I think—I think I have changed. No, it is not because my mother or anybody has been pressing me; in fact, I think it is a good deal because they have not. I saw him here once a fortnight ago, and I liked him. I did not do that before, you know."
"Did you tell him so?" asked the other voice.
"Yes; in so many words. He asked me to put out of my mind all the prejudice which had been created in it by his being, so he said, thrown at my head. I promised him to try. And I have tried. It makes a great difference," she said gravely.
"And you have seen him once since," said Marie, with a sudden intuition.