He had some excuse. In the soft, rosy twilight of the room--the study
at Selwoode is panelled in very dark oak, and the doors and windows
are screened with crimson hangings--her parti-coloured red-and-yellow
gown might have been a scrap of afterglow left over from an unusually
fine sunset. In a word, Miss Hugonin was a very quaint and colourful
and delectable figure as she came a little further into the room. Her
eyes shone like blue stars, and her hair shone--there must be pounds
of it, Billy thought--and her very shoulders, plump, flawless,
ineffable, shone with the glow of an errant cloud-tatter that is just
past the track of dawn, and is therefore neither pink nor white, but