Part 159

Halkett, returning from a conference with Warner and Gray, came out on the terrace to take his leave. They asked him to return when he could; promised to visit the sheds and see the Bristol biplane.

Part way down the steps he turned and came back, asked permission to leave his adieux with them for Sister Eila from whom he had not had an opportunity to take his leave, turned again and went away into the night, using his flashlight along the unfamiliar drive.

Ethra de Moidrey went into the house to keep her promise to Gray, and found him tired but none the worse for his participation at dinner.

Philippa and Warner had come in to visit him; the Countess found the book from which she had been reading to him since his arrival. He turned on his pillow and looked at her, and she seated herself beside the bed and opened the book on her knees.

"Do you remember where we left off?" she asked, smiling.

"I think it was where he was beginning to fall in love with her."

The Countess de Moidrey bent over the book. There was a slight color in her cheeks.

"I had not noticed that he was falling in love," she observed, turning the pages to find her place.

Philippa said to Warner:

"Could we walk down and see the searchlights? They are so wonderful on the water."

"Probably the sentinels won't permit us outside our own gates," he replied. "I know one thing; if you and I were not considered as part of the family of the Chateau, the military police would make us clear out. It's lucky I left the inn to come up here."

The Countess had begun reading in a low, soft voice, bending over her book beside the little lamp at the bedside, where Gray lay watching her under a hand that shaded his pallid face.

Something in her attitude and his, perhaps--or in her quiet voice--seemed subtly, to Philippa, to exclude her and the man with her from a silent entente too delicate, perhaps, to term an intimacy.

She touched Warner's arm, warily, not taking it into her possession as had been her unembarrassed custom only yesterday--even that very day.

Together they went out into the corridor, down the stairway, and presently discovered Peggy on the southern terrace gazing very earnestly at the stars.

That the young girl was wrapped, enmeshed, in the magic of the great web which Fate has been spinning since time began, they did not know.

Still stargazing, they left her and walked down the dark drive to the lodge where, through the iron grille, they saw hussars en vedette sitting their horses in the uncertain luster of the planets.

Overhead the dark foliage had begun to stir and sigh in the night breeze; now and again a yellowing leaf fell, rustling slightly; and they thought they could hear the Recollette among its rushes--the faintest murmur--but were not sure.

He remembered her song, there in the river meadow:

Hussar en vedette What do you see?--

And thought of the white shape on the bank--a true folk song, unfinished in its eerie suggestion which the imagination of the listeners must always finish.

Yet he said:

"Was he killed--that vedette on the Recollette, Philippa?"

She knew what he meant, smiled faintly:

"Does anybody see Death and live to say so?"

"Of course I knew," he said.

They turned back, walking slowly. He had drawn her arm through his, but it rested there very lightly, scarcely in contact at all.

"What a fine fellow Halkett is!" he said.