The boy laughed and stood at ease looking at the pretty face partly disclosed between door and wall with darkness for a velvety background.
"Just come out into the library while I smoke one cigarette," he began in his wheedling way. "I'm dying to talk to you about the game-preserve——"
"I can't; I'm not attired for a tête-à-tête with anything except my pillow."
"Then put on one of those fetching affairs you wear sometimes——"
"Oh, Scott, you are a nuisance!"
When, a few moments later, she came into the library in a delicate shimmering thing and little slippers of the same elusive tint, Scott jumped up and dragged a big chair forward.
"You certainly are stunning, Kathleen," he said frankly; "you look twenty with all the charm of thirty. Sit here; I've a map of the Roya-Neh forest to show you."
He drew up a chair for himself, lifted a big map from the table, and, unrolling it, laid it across her knees. Then he began to talk enthusiastically about lake and stream and mountain, and about wild boar and deer and keepers and lodges; and she bent her pretty head over the map, following his moving pencil with her eyes, sometimes asking a question, sometimes tracing a road with her own delicate finger.
Once or twice it happened that their hands touched en passant; and at the light contact, she was vaguely aware that somewhere, deep within her, the same faint dismay awoke; that in her, buried in depths unsuspected, something incredible existed, stirred, threatened.
"Scott, dear," she said quietly, "I am glad you are happy over Roya-Neh forest, but it was too expensive, and it troubles me; so I'm going to sleep to dream over it."