He was silent a moment, scanning her with laughing eyes. Then he shook his head. "Confess you took me for the ghost?" he said.
She hesitated; then must laugh too. She herself had told him the stories, so that his guess was natural.
"Perhaps I did," she said. "One more disappointment! Good-night."
He looked after her a quick undecided moment as she made a step in front of him, then at the half-burnt cigarette he held in his hand, threw the end away with a hasty gesture, overtook her and walked beside her along the corridor.
"I heard you and your mother come in," he said, as though explaining himself. "Then I waited till I thought you must both be asleep, and came down here to look at that wonderful effect on the old house." He pointed to the silver palace outside. "I have a trick of being sleepless—a trick, too, of wandering at night. My own people know it, and bear with me, but I am abashed that you should have found me out. Just tell me—in one word—how the ball went?"
He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly wide-awake as though it were three o'clock in the afternoon instead of three in the morning.
Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.
"It went very well," she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered foot on the first step. "There were six hundred people upstairs, and four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man. Everybody said it was splendid."
His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her. As he had often frankly warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations. Certainly, in this strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, in the midst of the sleep-bound house, he had found one. Her eyes were heavy, her cheek pale. But in this soft vague light—white arms and neck now hidden, now revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin—she was more enchanting than he had ever seen her. His breath quickened.
He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him. What harm—to her or to Raeburn? Raeburn would have chances enough before long. Why admit his monopoly before the time? She was not in love with him! As to Mrs. Grundy—absurd! What in the true reasonableness of things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as by day?