“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up.  “I have a car here, but it’s open.  Is it too cold?  Have you a fur coat?  I’ll send back to the house for an extra one.”  He paused, brisk as he was; the thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.

The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.

Mrs. Wayne had an idea.  She went to a window on the south side of the room, opened it, and looked out.  If he had good lungs, she told him, he could make his man hear.

Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil.  He leaned out and shouted.  The chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the order to go home for an extra coat.

Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.

“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.

She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let it broaden.

“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”

“Now, that does annoy me.”

“Calling down five stories?”

“No; your thinking I minded.”

“Well, I did think so.”

“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”

“I’m glad.  If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to arranging not to do them.”

Mr. Lanley was silent.  He was deciding that he should rearrange some of the details of his life.  Not that he contemplated giving all his orders from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention to preventing unimportant catastrophes.

Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier.  He put out the motor’s lights.  They were only a few feet above the water, which was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from white and yellow lights.  Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal.  Then a great steamer obscured it.

“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her discovery praised.  He never lost the impression that she enjoyed being praised.

Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it if Mrs. Wayne had not said: 

“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”