They were within a few steps of her door, almost opposite where, black and silent, his own house awaited him—as if, reproachfully, it gazed at him with darkened eyes. And suddenly she burst into a carol, and with quickened steps she danced him onwards:
“He called me a penguin, a penguin, a penguin;
He called me a penguin a long time ago!”
She sang it to the triumphant hit of “Voici le sabre!” And then they were on her doorstep. She had her key in the latch, the door went back into darkness.
“I’ll prove to you you called me that,” she said, and crouching forward, as she had bent to open the door, she caught the end of his sleeve and pulled him into the inner darkness. He could see nothing, and the heavy door was closed behind him.
PART II
I
AND suddenly, in the thick darkness, whirring as if it were a scream, intermitted for a moment and again commencing, a little bell rang out at Dudley Leicester’s elbow. As suddenly, but with a more gracious diffusion, light welled down from above his head, and Etta Hudson’s voice mingling with it:
“Stop that confounded thing! I don’t want all the servants in the house to know you are here.”
She leaned over the white and ormolu banisters: the light swinging over her head made a halo above her disordered hair; her white shoulders gleamed.