When he was beside the house with Talbot he had seen that face under a black hood, looking over the fence, and the single glance was sufficient. Now he stood beside her and put his hand upon her arm as if he had come there with her, that no one might take notice.
She started, looked up into his face, checked a cry and was silent, though he could feel the arm quivering under the touch of his fingers.
"Why are you here?" he asked in a strained whisper. "Do you not know better than to leave Miss Grayson's house, and, above all, to come to this place? Are you a mad woman?"
Anger was mixed with his alarm. She seemed at that moment a child who had disobeyed him. She shrank a little at his words, but turned toward him luminous eyes, in which the appeal soon gave way to an indignant fire.
"Do you know what it is to stay in hiding—to be confined within the four walls of one room?" she said, and her voice was more intense even than his had been. "Do you know what it is to sit in the dark and the cold when you love the warmth and the light and the music? I saw you and the other man and the satisfaction on your faces. Do you think that you alone were made for enjoyment?"
Prescott looked at her in surprise, such was the fire and intensity of her tone and so unexpected was her reply. He had associated her with other fields of action, more strenuous phases of life than this of the ballroom, the dance and the liquid flow of music. All at once he remembered that she was a woman like another woman there in the ballroom in silken skirts and with a rose in her hair. Unconsciously he placed her by the side of Helen Harley.
"But the danger!" he said at last. "You are hunted, woman though you are, and Richmond is small. At such a time as this every strange form is noted."
"I am not afraid," she replied, and a peculiar kind of pride rang in her tone. "If I am sought as a criminal it does not follow that I am such."
"And you have left Miss Grayson alone?"
"Miss Grayson has often been alone. She may dislike loneliness, but she does not fear it. Listen, they are dancing again!"