As soon as she was gone he returned to the hall, and taking from a peg a cloak with a Mother Goose hood, brought it to Lady Pippinworth, who had watched her mamma trip upstairs.

“Did I say I was going out?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Tommy, and she rose to let him put the elegant thing round her.  She was one of those dangerous women who look their best when you are helping them to put on their cloaks.

“Now,” he instructed her, “pull the hood over your head.”

“Is it so cold as that?” she said, obeying.

“I want you to wear it,” he answered.  What he meant was that she never looked quite so impudent as in her hood, and his vanity insisted that she should be armed to the teeth before they resumed hostilities.  The red light was in his eyes as he drew her into the garden where Grizel lay.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE RED LIGHT

It was an evening without stars, but fair, sufficient wind to make her Ladyship cling haughtily to his arm as they turned corners.  Many of the visitors were in the garden, some grouped round a quartet of gaily attired minstrels, but more sitting in little arbours or prowling in search of an arbour to sit in; the night was so dark that when our two passed beyond the light of the hotel windows they could scarce see the shrubs they brushed against; cigars without faces behind them sauntered past; several times they thought they had found an unoccupied arbour at last, when they heard the clink of coffee-cups.

“I believe the castle dates from the fifteenth century,” Tommy would then say suddenly, though it was not of castles he had been talking.

With a certain satisfaction he noticed that she permitted him, without comment, to bring in the castle thus and to drop it the moment the emergency had passed.  But he had little other encouragement.  Even when she pressed his arm it was only as an intimation that the castle was needed.

“I can’t even make her angry,” he said wrathfully to himself.

“You answer not a word,” he said in great dejection to her.

“I am afraid to speak,” she admitted.  “I don’t know who may hear.”

“Alice,” he said eagerly, “what would you say if you were not afraid to speak?”

They had stopped, and he thought she trembled a little on his arm, but he could not be sure.  He thought—­but he was thinking too much again; at least, Lady Pippinworth seemed to come to that conclusion, for with a galling little laugh she moved on.  He saw with amazing clearness that he had thought sufficiently for one day.

On coming into the garden with her, and for some time afterwards, he had been studying her so coolly, watching symptoms rather than words, that there is nothing to compare the man to but a doctor who, while he is chatting, has his finger on your pulse.  But he was not so calm now.  Whether or not he had stirred the woman, he was rapidly firing himself.