Her voice thrilled and sank; she stretched out her hand, patting the mare's neck, rejoicing with him.
"It's like old times, isn't it?" he said.
The night wind ruffled his bare head, kissed a wisp of Julia's lace and blew it against him. She might have been forgiven for thinking his thick utterance was for her. The little scene, to all present who knew their tale, was romantic.
Kitty Drake looked over her shoulder in a funny, conscience-stricken way; the Duchess was poking her in the back, and at the same time interposing her rugged presence between romance and Susan. In a minute the girl was shielded by an oddly-sympathizing bevy of women, fussing over her in a transparent hurry to see that she was wrapped up warm.
The stable clock behind the house was beginning to strike, and the men who had been dining there had disappeared to change. Nobody was measuring the length of that interview.... At last Barnaby came in three steps at a time, a portmanteau in his arms.
"I say, Kitty; where can I go and dress?"
She looked at him severely over Susan's head.
"Run in anywhere," she said, and he pursued his impetuous way upstairs. Julia reappeared by herself, on her face what Kitty Drake stigmatized as a maddening consciousness.
"They say they are going to ride in their shirt-sleeves," she said, "but that will hardly make them visible. It's nearly pitch dark outside."
"They are idiots," said Kitty Drake. "Fancy Gregory calling to us when we were upstairs to know if we would lend them our night-dresses. I told him I was too thrifty."