Presently his sensitive ears detected a light sound, a sweet and familiar sound, the play of a woman’s skirt against her ankles and the floor.
He broke off his mental composition and turned his head towards the shadowy depths of the room that lay between him and the window at which he had been gazing.
From out these darknesses a figure emerged from a mysterious door that opened and shut on farther recesses of blackness, moved into the clearer shadows and finally into the full light.
It was a woman, young and notable, who appeared not to notice that there was any one in the room, for she stood in a watchful, motionless pose, gazing up the dark staircase from which the Duke had descended.
Her dress was fantastic and charming, a tight blue satin bodice gleamed round her slender waist, and beneath it panniers of pink gauze billowed over her hips and were looped away from a white petticoat trimmed with blue jet that glimmered even when she stood still.
Round the bottom of this petticoat was a garland of pink roses, her stockings, that showed well above her ankles, were blue, her shoes white, heelless and fastened in with embroidered pink ribbons.
On one arm she carried a pale yellow cloak and a black velvet mask; over her wide shoulders was flung, carelessly, but gracefully, a white silk scarf with a deep fringe border.
Her dusky brown hair was slightly powdered and gathered on the top of her small head by a huge tortoiseshell comb set with red coral, long blue jet earrings quivered in her ears, and she wore a necklace of fine pearls.
The Duke noticed these things and the delicacy and grace of the woman herself, the poise of her head, the straight lines of her profile, the fineness of her hands and ankles, the richness of her locks, the dark sweep of her eyebrows and the dusky bloom on her round cheek.