“No!” she said, laughing. But her eyes were a little big. Her fingers played with his watch-chain. “I’d rather,” she said presently, “you went later on and took me. All this is so odd still: the House, and that; and I love it so. And after all, it is a long way and several years too, sometimes, in the Lotus Room, even though it is all over next morning. I’d rather we went together. If anything happened then, well, we’d both be done in, and it wouldn’t matter so much, would it?”
“Both be what?” said Lessingham. “I’m afraid your language is not all that might be wished.”
“Well, you taught me!” said she; and they laughed.
They sat there till the shadows crept over the lawn and up the trees, and the high rocks of the mountain shoulder beyond burned red in the evening rays. He said, “If you like to stroll a bit of way up the fell-side, Mercury is visible to-night. We might get a glimpse of him just after sunset.”
A little later, standing on the open hillside below the hawking bats, they watched for the dim planet that showed at last low down in the west between the sunset and the dark.
He said, “It is as if Mercury had a finger on me to-night, Mary. It’s no good my trying to sleep to-night except in the Lotus Room.”
Her arm tightened in his. “Mercury?” she said. “It is another world. It is too far.”
But he laughed and said, “Nothing is too far.”
They turned back as the shadows deepened. As they stood in the dark of the arched gate leading from the open fell into the garden, the soft clear notes of a spinet sounded from the house. She put up a finger. “Hark,” she said. “Your daughter playing Les Barricades.”
They stood listening. “She loves playing,” he whispered. “I’m glad we taught her to play.” Presently he whispered again, “Les Barricades Mystérieuses. What inspired Couperin with that enchanted name? And only you and I know what it really means. Les Barricades Mystérieuses.”