Kate laughed. But in spite of her new gaiety, the corners of her mouth had quite lost their winged tilt.
After a few more dances, supper was announced. Kate had promised Jack Denton early in the evening that she would take supper with him. She saw him now looking about for her. In an instant their eyes would meet and he would hurry across to her where she stood for the minute alone. But she suddenly realized that she was tired. She ached with too much dancing. She would never have acknowledged this to herself, of course, unless something had gone wrong with the evening. Hardly knowing why, she stepped out of the door near which she was for the instant standing, backward. That step precipitated her into a different world entirely. The stars had disappeared behind dark, windy rain clouds. The air was fresh, and you heard a wind and felt its edges. Kate took a deep breath. She would stay here in the blowy dark just for a little. It wouldn’t hurt Jack to search a minute longer.
She moved, still backward, farther away from the lighted doorway. She brushed against a garden chair and sat down. She leaned her head against its high back. An impulse came to take off the magic silver cap and be herself. Whimsically she lifted it from her head and placed it on her knee.
“Now you’re just Kate Marshall,” she spoke to herself, but aloud. “Just ordinary, plain-as-day Kate Marshall. Dowagers can’t spoil anything for you. They wouldn’t pay enough attention to you now to bother about spoiling. All the magic that’s really your own, all that isn’t false magic, she can’t touch. Nothing she could say could touch it.”
Kate sighed, having finished her little heartfelt speech to herself. She felt relieved and freshened. She had certainly cast off the dowager’s spell.
“That’s right. All the magic that’s your own, nobody, even a Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith, can touch. It’s safer than the stars from troubling!”
That was a low voice speaking directly behind her. No, it was not simply her own thoughts, although those words might very well have been in her mind that minute, for some of them were right out of “The King of the Fairies.” But it had been a voice, a man’s voice.
Slowly she turned her head. Directly behind her chair a man was standing. She could not see his features at all, because the night was so black, but she thought that he was hatless, and she knew he was in dark clothes. The wind, not merely its edges, had come to earth now. Was it flapping the borders of a long dark cape enveloping the vague figure?
The vague figure bent down to her. Yes, it was a dark cape, blowing away from his shoulders on the wind. It seemed as though the being himself leaned down out of the wind. “Give this to Elsie, please,” he said, in quite a matter-of-fact tone now. Then the wind took him. At least Kate could not see him any more. He had stepped back among the tall lilac bushes that bordered the terrace at that spot.
When he was gone it was just exactly as though he had never been, except for the folded paper that Kate found clutched in her hand. That folded paper, however, definitely fixed him as a reality. But who could it have been? Mr. O’Brien, the detective, crossed Kate’s mind, or one of his assistants, that young man of the polka-dotted tie. But instantly she laughed, though silently, at such a notion. They, neither of them, she felt sure, would by any chance have quoted from “The King of the Fairies” while doing business. “It’s safer than the stars from troubling.” Had the King of the Fairies himself passed her there on the wind? No, hardly. He wouldn’t be leaving a note for Elsie.