Was he going to let her depart alone? How would she get a taxi? It was half past eleven. Oh! how tired she felt now. Her feet seemed leaden as she slipped the cloak round her shoulders. She cast one more glance up at the door of the studio. But it remained closed. His manners, with his hopes of her favours, had forsaken him. There had been something in Rhoda Carnegie’s remarks, after all.
She opened the hall-door, and found the stone stairs only very dimly lit. She went heavily down them, forgetting that she might have summoned the lift. Her soft pink dress trailed after her, for she was too tired to hold it up. How unending the stairs were! Would she ever get to the bottom? How many flights was it—six?
It seemed to her that she had been plodding down the stairs for ages, when suddenly a hall-door opened just as she was rounding a turn of the staircase. A voice said quietly, “I’ll come in to-morrow morning to see how he is getting on.”
She had unconsciously shrunk back against the wall among the shadows, but at the recognition of his voice she exclaimed, she thought in a whisper, “Colin!”
He stopped in the act of running down the stairs, and came back. But now she had no volition left to move backwards or forwards. He groped up the stairs, and saw the gleam of a diamond spray on her corsage. He went nearer and saw her.
“Claudia!... Claudia!” The first “Claudia” was pure astonishment, but the second held something more, something that seemed to match the look in his eyes when he had been watching her flirting with Frank at her mother’s “at home.”
“Colin,” she said pitifully, “I’m so tired ... take me home ... please, take me home....”
She stumbled a little, and he quietly put her hand through his arm.
“It’s not worth summoning the lift ... it’s only two flights; lean on my arm.”