A NIGHT IN JULY
She reached the door before him. He had turned to say considerately to the good woman of the restaurant:
"We shall be late.... Frightfully, I expect! Promise me you won't sit up!"
"Oh! but I can't promise! One never knows! Best to have people up an' ready when there might be need of 'em!" Patrine heard, as she wrenched at the handle of the green curtained glass door.
"No—no! Let me!"
His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp thrill had traversed her. "Vile, hateful creature!" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew—the other woman within her, whom she loathed. "Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?" Then as she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. She recoiled, saying in awed and shaken tones:
"Why! What has happened? What does it mean? ... How horrible!"
The door had shut behind them. Now the round dome of the sky showed not black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian darkness, upon the surface of which figures—were they men or devils?—moved....
"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham! It's nothing ... though I ought to have wanted you...!"
Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his voice was unsteady as he went on: