He paused at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his sides, as keenly wide-awake as though it were three o’clock in the afternoon instead of three in the morning.

Womanlike, her mood instantly shaped itself to his.

“It went very well,” she said perversely, putting her satin-slippered foot on the first step.  “There were six hundred people upstairs, and four hundred coachmen and footmen downstairs, according to our man.  Everybody said it was splendid.”

His piercing enigmatic gaze could not leave her.  As he had often frankly warned her, he was a man in quest of sensations.  Certainly, in this strange meeting with Aldous Raeburn’s betrothed, in the midst of the sleep-bound house, he had found one.  Her eyes were heavy, her cheek pale.  But in this soft vague light—­white arms and neck now hidden, now revealed by the cloak she had thrown about her glistening satin—­she was more enchanting than he had ever seen her.  His breath quickened.

He said to himself that he would make Miss Boyce stay and talk to him.  What harm—­to her or to Raeburn?  Raeburn would have chances enough before long.  Why admit his monopoly before the time?  She was not in love with him!  As to Mrs. Grundy—­absurd!  What in the true reasonableness of things was to prevent human beings from conversing by night as well as by day?

“One moment”—­he said, delaying her.  “You must be dead tired—­too tired for romance.  Else I should say to you, turn aside an instant and look at the library.  It is a sight to remember.”

Inevitably she glanced behind her, and saw that the library door was ajar.  He flung it open, and the great room showed wide, its high domed roof lost in shadow, while along the bare floor and up the latticed books crept, here streaks and fingers, and there wide breadths of light from the unshuttered and curtainless windows.

“Isn’t it the very poetry of night and solitude?” he said, looking in with her.  “You love the place; but did you ever see it so lovable?  The dead are here; you did right to come and seek them!  Look at your namesake, in that ray.  To-night she lives!  She knows that is her husband opposite—­those are her books beside her.  And the rebel!”—­he pointed smiling to the portrait of John Boyce.  “When you are gone I shall shut myself up here—­sit in his chair, invoke him—­and put my speech together.  I am nervous about to-morrow” (he was bound, as she knew, to a large Labour Congress in the Midlands, where he was to preside), “and sleep will make no terms with me.  Ah!—­how strange!  Who can that be passing the avenue?”

He made a step or two into the room, and put up his hand to his brow, looking intently.  Involuntarily, yet with a thrill, Marcella followed.  They walked to the window.

“It is Hurd!” she cried in a tone of distress, pressing her face against the glass.  “Out at this time, and with a gun!  Oh, dear, dear!”

There could be no question that it was Hurd.  Wharton had seen him linger in the shadowy edge of the avenue, as though reconnoitring, and now, as he stealthily crossed the moonlit grass, his slouching dwarf’s figure, his large head, and the short gun under his arm, were all plainly visible.