“Madam,” he said, “I beg your pardon.”
She laughed with mischievous charm, and drew her hand away slowly so that it brushed his cheek.
“How simple of you, Sir John. And yet you can handle a sword so well. Shall we follow my lord?”
“And the key?” he asked, with a glance at the floor.
“Is in the lock. And the lock is turned. So you see!”
She dropped the cloak that she was wearing, and as they ascended into the light he could see the splendor of her dress gleam up gradually, the color of her hair, and the compelling beauty of her face. Her eyes seemed full of sparkles of light; her lips red, soft, and mobile, as though on the brink of a smile.
She paused at the head of the stairway, and stretched out an arm across the passage that led toward a room whence light and the sound of voices came. John Gore paused also, and she stood and looked into his eyes with an earnestness that made him color.
“I am serious now, Sir John. We are risking our necks here; it may be no mere supper-party and a trifling loss at cards. You are young—and, then, you have been in other lands. And yet, after all, I am speaking to you as though you were a boy.”
For the moment he could only look at her, for she was so very lovely and so womanly that it was not in a man’s nature not to look.
“I am in the dark,” he said, at last.