The grip left Lord Lethbridge’s throat, but before he could turn a thrust between his shoulder-blades made him lose his balance. The parapet was too low to save him; he fell over it and into the lily-pond with a splash that extinguished the lights in that cluster of artificial flowers which he had looked at so scornfully a minute before.
A quarter of an hour later the ballroom had begun to fill again, and the fiddlers had resumed their task. Horatia came out on to the terrace and found several people standing there in little groups. She hesitated, looking for the Scarlet Domino, and saw him in a moment, sitting sideways on the parapet and meditatively surveying the pond below. She went up to him. “I w-wasn’t so very long, was I?”
He turned his head, and at once stood up. “Not at all,” he said politely. “And now—that little room!”
She had half advanced her hand to lay it on his arm, but at that she drew back. He stretched out his own, and took hers in it. “Is anything the matter?” he asked softly.
She seemed uncertain. “Your v-voice sounds queer. It—it is you, isn’t it?”
“But of course it is!” he said. “I think I must have swallowed a morsel of bone at supper, and scraped my throat. Will you walk, ma’am?”
She let him draw her hand through his arm. “Yes, b-but are you sure no one will come into the room? It would look very particular if anybody were to see me l-lose a lock of hair to you—if I d-do lose.”
“Who is to know you?” he said, holding the heavy curtain back from a window at the end of the terrace. “Butyou need not be alarmed. Once we have drawn the curtains—like that—no one will come in.”
Horatia stood by the table in the middle of the small saloon and watched the Scarlet Domino pull the curtains together. Suddenly, in spite of all her desire to do something outrageous, she wished that she had not pledged herself to this game. It had seemed innocent enough to dance with Lethbridge, to sup with him in the full eye of the public, but to be alone with him in a private room was another matter. All at once he seemed to her to have changed. She stole a look at his masked face, but the candles on the table left him in a shadow. She glanced towards the door, which very imperfectly shut off the noise of the violins. “The d-door, R-Rob-ert?”
“Locked,” he said. “It leads into the ballroom. Still nervous, Horry? Did I not say you were not a real gamester?”