“You frighten me, a little,” she confessed.  “Are you at all like—­like that below inside of you?  I have a feeling that you might be.  If you were one of the men about Vauxhall you’d be kissing me now ... if I liked you.  But, although I do like you, I wouldn’t kiss you for an emerald buckle.”  He recognized that she spoke seriously; her voice bore no connective suggestion.  Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased.  Yet the idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts.  He considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense of her bodily seductiveness.

At the same time an obscure uneasiness, rebellion, possessed him; it was the old, familiar feeling of revolt, of distaste for imprisoning circumstance.  It came to him acutely, almost as if a voice had whispered in his ear, warning him, urging him into the wild, to escape threatening catastrophe.  He determined to leave Myrtle Forge in the morning, to return to the stream he had followed into the serene heart of the woods.  There he would stay until—­until Ludowika Winscombe had gone.  Howat had no especial sense of danger from her; only for the moment she typified the entire world of trivial artifice.  He gazed at her with a conscious detachment possible because of the rarity in his existence of such figures as hers.

She had risen, and her cloak fallen upon the grass.  Howat could see her face beneath hair faintly powdered with silver dust and the ruffled patch of white tied pertly under her chin.  Her smoothly turning shoulders, filmed in lawn, and low bodice crowned an extravagant circumference of ruffled silk and rosettes.  Against the night of the Province, the invisible but felt presence of immutable hills, she was like a puppet, a grotesque figure of comedy.  He regarded her sombrely from the step, his chin cupped in a hand.

But, again, she surprised him, speaking entirely out of the character he had assigned her, in a spirit that seemed utterly incongruous, but which was yet warm with conviction.  “I want to explain a great deal to you,” she said, “that really isn’t explainable.  It isn’t sensible, and yet it is the strongest feeling I remember.  It’s about here and you and me.  You can’t picture my life, and so you don’t know how strange this is, how different from all I’ve ever lived.

“I think I told you I was born in Paris—­you see some of us came to France when Louis took a Polish princess, and there my mother married an English gentleman.  Well, it was always the Court, in France and in England.  Always the Court—­do you know what that means?  It’s a place where women are pretty pink and white candies that men are always picking over.  It’s a great bed with a rose silk counterpane and closed draperies.  Champagne and music and scent and masques.  Little plays with the intrigue in the audience; favours behind green hedges.