“Why, am I so very terrible? What do I do to you? Speak to me. Why are you so guarded, so unenterprising?”
She cast a stage glance round. It was very funny, but George knew that Ben was the commissionaire and Lady Scilly didn’t, so she couldn’t think why George was so stiff. In fact, if George had only known it, he was bi-chaperoned—if that is the way to put it—for there was me too. Ben and I enjoyed it hugely, but I don’t think George did, because he could not quite make a fool of himself before Ben. Besides, it was draughty out there, and George takes cold easily. He kept trying to get her to come in, and she pretended to be babyish and wouldn’t. She said she had never been out in the open street at midnight in her life before, and she thoroughly enjoyed it; that it was a Romeo and Juliet night, or some rot of that sort, and that she might never have such an opportunity again. But poor George felt he could not play Romeo, because of Ben, and there was nothing to climb, except a lamp-post that led to nothing, since Juliet was standing in the gutter below it.
George looked at his watch, and said, “In ten minutes they will give the signal for the removal of masks. Had you not better——?”
“I shall leave the party,” she said. “I shall walk straight home! It will spoil all the effect of this enchanted night, if we have to meet again in the glare of——”
“The lights are shaded,” George put in.
“I alluded to the glare of publicity!” she said. “I shall ask this commissionaire,” she said, “to call my carriage——”
“Better not,” said George hastily, “for you would have to give him your name,—your name which I know. For my sake—won’t you slip back into the ball-room and submit to the ordeal, as I know it is, of unmasking like the rest? Believe me it is best.”
“It is my host commands, is it not?” she said slyly, to show him that she had known it was he all the time, and ran past him, in a skittish way. As if he hadn’t known all the time that she knew that he knew that she knew who he was! Grown-up people do waste so much time in pretending.
Well, I thought if masks were going to be removed, I had better take up a respectable-looking position at once, say, beside Miss Mander, which seemed suitable, and I went in. Then I saw Lady Scilly again, and wanted so to know what she was up to. She was stealing out of the room, and the devil was going with her. He was The Bittern man, of course, only I didn’t know she knew him. They were talking very earnestly.
“You know the way?” she was asking him.