Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as hard as pebbles.
"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and he has put up the chain. Since you must let me in for a silly betrayal of my unexpected return you had better come down into the basement and see if you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if he sleeps with it open. His room is next to the pantry and silver-chest. If I set an alarm going accidentally, he will only think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head further under the clothes."
"But, Ferlie——" She was half-way down the area steps and he, less familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.
Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel. She tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.
"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover his breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel. An instant she swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a pipe running down from the bathroom window. She was now only a shadowy shape poised above him in the darkness.
"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said that 'to the pure all things are impure.'"
The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of its owner, in his arms.
CHAPTER VII
Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him, she is lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow considerably smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any rate, he will never leave his wife a pauper."