Something in her attitude and his, perhaps—or in her quiet voice—seemed subtly, to Philippa, to exclude her and the man with her from a silent entente too delicate, perhaps, to term an intimacy.
She touched Warner's arm, warily, not taking it into her possession as had been her unembarrassed custom only yesterday—even that very day.
Together they went out into the corridor, down the stairway, and presently discovered Peggy on the southern terrace gazing very earnestly at the stars.
That the young girl was wrapped, enmeshed, in the magic of the great web which Fate has been spinning since time began, they did not know.
Still stargazing, they left her and walked down the dark drive to the lodge where, through the iron grille, they saw hussars en vedette sitting their horses in the uncertain luster of the planets.
Overhead the dark foliage had begun to stir and sigh in the night breeze; now and again a yellowing leaf fell, rustling slightly; and they thought they could hear the Récollette among its rushes—the faintest murmur—but were not sure.
He remembered her song, there in the river meadow:
Hussar en vedette
What do you see?—
And thought of the white shape on the bank—a true folk song, unfinished in its eerie suggestion which the imagination of the listeners must always finish.
Yet he said: