At that moment the dim circle of the window was intersected by a smaller and much brighter circle. He automatically stood up and stepped forward.
The girl in the room across the bay had switched on her light. Now she threw down a cloak and walked around the room as if searching for something, the horsetail of black hair flirting from side to side as she turned her head this way and that. She was less than twenty feet away and he could see her clearly. She was wearing a gray suit fashionably pied with great splotches of black. Her face was compact, nose small, mouth broad, eyes very wide set, and, as Phil now noticed definitely for the first time, her ears were lobeless and curved up to an almost faun-like tip. As on those rare occasions when he'd glimpsed her before, he felt a quiver of uneasiness.
She shrugged her shoulders, as if giving up her hunt, and walked over to the window, looking straight at Phil. He shrank back a bit, though he knew he was invisible. She grasped a knob on the rim and swung her hand in a quarter-circle, the window gradually blacking out as she did so.
Then, just as Phil started to turn away, the window began to brighten again until it was almost as transparent as before. He realized what must have happened. The inner pane of polarizing glass had missed its catch and revolved silently onward a few extra inches. He'd known it to happen to his own.
The girl across the way thought she was hidden. She wasn't.
She stretched and took off her coat. Phil gnawed his lip. He didn't quite want to watch her. But anything was welcome that would distract him from the thought with which his last reverie had ended, and, Phil knew very well, this window could provide most gripping, if barren, distractions.
She slowly parted the magnetic clasps on her blouse, then slipped out of it with a lithe twist of her shoulders. Phil forgot his fears, enthralled by the beauty of her dark-nippled breasts. Below them, almost cupping them, she seemed to be wearing some sort of close fitting, velvet black undergarment.
She stepped out of her skirt. The undergarment ended raggedly at her thighs. It puzzled him, perhaps because of the faint smokiness of the window. It looked almost as if it were made of some sort of fur.
Balancing expertly on one leg, she drew the stocking from the other, and along with the stocking one of those grotesque ten-inch platform shoes.
Only—and here Phil's heart jumped—she seemed to have stripped off much more than that. To be precise, her foot.