At the present moment, however, he was rather conscious of much unusual stirring and exaltation of personality. As he stood looking out into the English night the currents of his blood ran free and fast. Never had he felt the natural appetite for living so strong in him, combined with what seemed to be at once a divination of coming change and a thirst for it. Was it the mere advancement of his fortunes?—or something infinitely subtler and sweeter? It was as though waves of softness and of yearning welled up from some unknown source, seeking an object and an outlet.
As he stood there dreaming, he suddenly became conscious of sounds in the room overhead. Or rather, in the now absolute stillness of the rest of the house, he realized that the movements and voices above him, which had really been going on since he entered his room, persisted when everything else had died away.
Two people were talking; or rather, one voice ran on perpetually, broken at intervals by the other. He began to suspect to whom the voice belonged; and as he did so, the window above his own was thrown open. He stepped back involuntarily, but not before he had caught a few words in French spoken apparently by Lady Kitty.
"Ciel! what a night!—and how the flowers smell! And the stars—I adore the stars! Mademoiselle!—come here! Mademoiselle! tell me—I won't tell tales—do you, really and truly, believe in God?"
A laugh, which was a laugh of pleasure, ran through Ashe, as he hurriedly put out his lights.
"Tormentor!" he said to himself,—"must you put a woman through her theological paces at this time of night? Can't you go to sleep, you little whirlwind? What's to be done? If I shut my window the noise will scare her. But I can't stand eavesdropping here."
He withdrew softly from the window and began to undress. But Lady Kitty was leaning out, and her voice carried amazingly. Heard in this way also, apart from form and face, it became a separate living thing. Ashe stood arrested, his watch that he was winding up in his hand. He had known the voice till now as something sharp and light, the sign surely of a chatterer and a flirt. Tonight, as Kitty made use of it to expound her own peculiar theology to the French governess, whereof a few fragments now and then floated down to Ashe, nothing could have been more musical, melancholy, caressing. A voice full of sex, and the spell of sex.
What had she been talking of all these hours to Mademoiselle?—a lady whom she could never have set eyes on before this visit. He thought of her face, in the drawing-room, as she had spoken of her sister,—of her eyes, so full of a bright feverish pain, which had hung upon his own.
Had she, indeed, been confiding all her home secrets to this stranger? Ashe felt a movement of distaste, almost of disgust. Yet he remembered that it was by her unconventionality, her lack of all proper reticence, or, as many would have said, all delicate feeling, that she had made her first impression upon him. Aye, that had been an impression—an impression indeed! He realized the fact profoundly, as he stood lingering in the darkness, trying not to hear the voice that thrilled him.
At last!—was she going to bed?
"Ah!—but I am a pig! to keep you up like this. Allez dormir!" (The sound of a kiss.) "I? Oh no!—why should one go to bed? It is in the night one begins to live—"
She fell to humming a little French tune, then broke off.
"You remember?—you promise? You have the letter?"
Asseverations apparently from Mademoiselle, and a mention of eight o'clock, followed by remorse from Kitty.
"Eight o'clock! And I keep you like this. I am a brute beast! Allez—allez vite!" And quick steps scudded across the floor above, followed by the shutting of a door.
Kitty, however, came back to the window, and Ashe could still hear her sighing and talking to herself.
What had she been plotting? A letter? Conveyed by Mademoiselle?—to whom?
Long after all sounds above had ceased Ashe still lay awake, thinking of the story he had heard from Lord Grosville. Certainly, if he had known it, he would never have gone familiarly to Madame
