But Barbara did not answer his question, and began to speak of other things.  And all that afternoon and evening she talked away so lightly that Lord Dennis, but for his instinct, would have been deceived.

That wonderful smiling mask—­the inscrutability of Youth—­was laid aside by her at night.  Sitting at her window, under the moon, ’a gold-bright moth slow-spinning up the sky,’ she watched the darkness hungrily, as though it were a great thought into whose heart she was trying to see.  Now and then she stroked herself, getting strange comfort out of the presence of her body.  She had that old unhappy feeling of having two selves within her.  And this soft night full of the quiet stir of the sea, and of dark immensity, woke in her a terrible longing to be at one with something, somebody, outside herself.  At the Ball last night the ‘flying feeling’ had seized on her again; and was still there—­a queer manifestation of her streak of recklessness.  And this result of her contacts with Courtier, this ‘cacoethes volandi’, and feeling of clipped wings, hurt her—­as being forbidden hurts a child.

She remembered how in the housekeeper’s room at Monkland there lived a magpie who had once sought shelter in an orchid-house from some pursuer.  As soon as they thought him wedded to civilization, they had let him go, to see whether he would come back.  For hours he had sat up in a high tree, and at last come down again to his cage; whereupon, fearing lest the rooks should attack him when he next took this voyage of discovery, they clipped one of his wings.  After that the twilight bird, though he lived happily enough, hopping about his cage and the terrace which served him for exercise yard, would seem at times restive and frightened, moving his wings as if flying in spirit, and sad that he must stay on earth.

So, too, at her window Barbara fluttered her wings; then, getting into bed, lay sighing and tossing.  A clock struck three; and seized by an intolerable impatience at her own discomfort, she slipped a motor coat over her night-gown, put on slippers, and stole out into the passage.  The house was very still.  She crept downstairs, smothering her footsteps.  Groping her way through the hall, inhabited by the thin ghosts of would-be light, she slid back the chain of the door, and fled towards the sea.  She made no more noise running in the dew, than a bird following the paths of air; and the two ponies, who felt her figure pass in the darkness, snuffled, sending out soft sighs of alarm amongst the closed buttercups.  She climbed the wall over to the beach.  While she was running, she had fully meant to dash into the sea and cool herself, but it was so black, with just a thin edging scarf of white, and the sky was black, bereft of lights, waiting for the day!