The slight stir occasioned by her addition to the company subsided, and the sense of constraint became even more marked. Nobody appeared to care to know his neighbour; there was no whispering, no murmuring, even the indispensable fidgeting was accomplished in an apprehensive and apologetic manner. A few men breathed audibly, a few fans stirred imperceptibly an atmosphere supercharged with radiations from so many human bodies added to the natural heat of a summer's evening; there were no other sounds or movements of any consequence. Sally became uncomfortably susceptible to the undercurrent of high nervous tension, conscious of a slight dew on her hands and forehead, and surprisingly conscious of the sonorous thumping of her heart. Unaccountably, nobody else seemed to hear it.
Perhaps they were all listening to their own hearts. But why . . .?
She wasted a few moments vainly scrutinising the masks in her immediate neighbourhood. Their eyes gleamed uncannily through the slits in the black silk, and when she intercepted a direct glance, it was hastily lowered or averted, as if there were something indecorous in acknowledging her bewildered appeal.
Again, perhaps, they were as much puzzled by her incognito as she was by theirs.
Those small shapes of black, silk-covered cardboard proved singularly effective, even when they concealed no more than the nose and the cheeks immediately beneath the eyes. She found it surprisingly difficult to fix an identification, even when satisfied she could not be in error; but she was measurably sure of Mrs. Artemas beneath Diana's Grecian draperies, of Trego in his Western guise, of Mercedes Pride in the conventional make-up of a witch. The rest at once provoked and eluded conjecture; she fancied she knew Lyttleton in the doublet and hose of Sir Francis Drake, but could not feel certain; divested of his peculiarly well-tailored personality, he was astonishingly like half a dozen other men among the guests.
Presently Mrs. Gosnold's maid, Marie, appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, holding in her hand a number of envelopes, and at a nod from her mistress began to thread the gathering, presenting one envelope to each guest, together with a small pencil such as is commonly attached to dance-programs.
The incident provided a grateful interruption to a situation that was rapidly assuming in Sally's esteem the grotesqueness of a dream. Remembering that this was Gosnold House, the focal point of America's most self-sufficient summer colony, and that all these subdued and inarticulate masqueraders were personages daily exploited by the press as the brightest stars in the social firmament, the incongruity of this dumb gathering seemed as glaring, as bizarre as anything her fancy could conceive.
And when her envelope was handed her and she had lifted the flap and withdrawn an oblong correspondence-card bearing the monogram A-G and nothing else, the final effect of meaningless mystery seemed to have been consummated.
But this, as it happened, was coincident with the arrival of the last two guests--one of whom was a lithe and shapely Harlequin in party-coloured tights, and the other a bewitchingly blond Columbine-- and then the purpose of the meeting was soon exposed.
With no more expression than she had employed in the case of Sally, Mrs. Gosnold saluted the last comers with a request to enter and be seated, then directed her maid to go out into the hall, close the door, and stand guard to prevent eavesdropping. When the door was closed she plunged directly into a prepared address.