Marion tried to say something, but then stole anxiously and in silence from the room.
"Lina," Betty directed the chambermaid, "tomorrow I wish to sleep late, and no one, do you hear?--no one must disturb me."
Left alone, she began to walk up and down quietly and busily. She changed her clothes, putting on a brown cloth dress, put on her hat, wrapped herself in her rain-coat, took her umbrella, wrote on a slip of paper "I am with him" and laid it on her dressing-table, and then sat there like a traveler in a station waiting for her train. Outside it thundered at intervals. Downstairs in the sleeping house the old familiar voices of the clocks called to each other through the silent rooms.
Billy softly descended into the garden by way of the back stairs. Heavy clouds hung in the sky. Tonight the whole world was full of voices and sounds; a gust struck the trees and made them murmur with excitement. Withered leaves chased with a rustle along the path before Billy. Somewhere a window-shutter creaked, a branch groaned. It was as if an Event were straying through the gloom and waking the sleeping garden. Billy went very quickly, as quickly as in her childhood, when she had wished to pass through the dark living-room to the brightly lighted nursery. A flash darted across the sky and snatched the darkness, like a black coverlet, from the pond, from the willows pensively bending over the reeds, from the water-lilies lying quietly in all the blackness; but all this seemed as strange to Billy as if she had never seen it. She hastened farther, thinking and feeling but one thing: to be there by the lime-tree with him--there was security, there the storm would have been weathered. As she issued from the park, another flash illumined the landscape, and she saw a black figure, the pointed hood of the rain-coat drawn over the head, leaning against the trunk of the lime-tree.
"Boris!" Billy cried out.
"Hush," answered Boris, "come." He laid her arm in his and drew her away with him. They walked over a damp meadow, then along a field of barley, where a corncrake rattled excitedly as if giving a signal.
"Where are we going?" asked Billy in a low voice.
Boris stopped. "You ask?" he said; "if you are afraid, I will lead you back. I will lead you to the house, you may be sure; there is still time."
"And you?" asked Billy hesitatingly.
"Ah, I!" replied Boris, and that sounded so sorrowful, so infinitely lonely, that Billy was again thrilled by that painful admiring compassion, which made her quite defenseless against Boris.