When they came, in the course of the dance, to one of the doors, she
stopped suddenly.
"Do you mind? It is so hot," she murmured.
"N--o," he said, as if awaking suddenly. "Let us go outside."
He caught up a fur cloak that was lying on a bench, and disregarding
her laughing remonstrance that the thing did not belong to her, he put
it round her and led her on to the terrace. She looked up at him just
as they were passing out of the stream of light, saw how set and hard
his face was, how straight the lips and sombre the eyes, and her hand,
as it rested lightly on his arm, quivered like a leaf in autumn. When
they had got into the open air, he threw back his head and drew a long
breath.
"Yes; it was hot in there," he said.
They walked slowly up and down for a minute, passing and repassing
similar couples; then suddenly, as if the presence of others, the sound
of their voices and laughter, jarred upon him, Stafford said: "Shall we go into the garden? It is quiet there--and I want to speak to
you."
"If you like," she said, in a low voice, which she tried to make as
languid as usual; but her heart began to beat fiercely and her lips
trembled, and he might have heard her breath coming quickly had he not
been absorbed in his own reflections.
They went down the steps and into the semi-darkness of the beautiful
garden. The silence was broken by the hum of the distant voices and the
splashing of a fountain which reflected the electric light as the spray
rose and fell with rhythmic regularity. Stafford stopped at this and
looked at the reflection of the stars in the shallow water. Something
in its simplicitude and the quiet, coming after the glitter and the
noise of the ball-room, called up the remembrance of Herondale, and the
quiet, love-laden hours he had spent there with Ida. The thought went
through him with a sharp pain, and he thrust it away from him as one
thrusts away a threatening weakness.
"What is it you wanted to say to me?" asked Maude, not coldly or
indifferently as she would have asked the question of another man, but
softly, dreamily.
He walked on with her a few paces, looking straight before him as if he
were trying to find words suitable for the answer; then he turned his
face to her and looked at her steadily, though his head was burning and
the plash of the fountain sounded like the roar of the sea in his ears.