“What next?” he murmured. “You surpass my expectations. I can say no more than that. But you must put that scarf about your shoulders directly you go out or you will take cold.”
“Practical Englishman! I never had a cold in my life.”
“Wonderful young person! Put it on at once. We are starting.”
Miss Holmes looked like a lorelei with an American education, in pale green. Her sister was draped in sage green, and the other artist of her sex in red and yellow Spanish shawls. Mrs. Rothe wore an elaborate blue gown with an air of doing the occasion all the honor possible. Over, Rothe, and the prince wore the conventional evening dress; the foreign artists were in their velvet jackets, with the one exception of the German, who had got himself up in the property costume of a Spanish grandee.
Miss Holmes draped a white lace shawl about her head and shoulders. “Come!” she said. “It is time to start.” And she led the way down the dark street with her prince. She was to dance many times with Over, and amiably gave the brief interval to the admirer who was much too serious for even the stately quadrille.
Over and Catalina brought up in the rear. She drew close to him with a little shiver.
“I still have that sense of being watched,” she said. “I can’t understand why I should be so silly as to notice it. I am usually afraid of nothing—never had a nerve before.” But she did understand, and resented. Over had roused and quickened all her femininity, and she longed for his protection, wondered at her former boy-like indifference to sympathy as to peril.
Over drew her hand through his arm. “It may be nothing and it may mean a good deal. Mind you do not wander off by yourself in the palace. If you do I shall be hunting for you, and that will spoil my evening. This dance has upset our plans, but we must have a stroll together through some of those old courts and corridors before the party breaks up.”
XXV
