MASKS AND MASKERS
Moors and Juliets and Circassian slaves and Knights at Arms were
fast emerging from lift or cloak room, and confronting each other
through their masks in sheepish defiance and curiosity. Adventurous
spirits were circulating. Voices, lowered and guarded, began to
engage in nervous, tittering banter.... Laughter, belatedly
smothered, flared to betrayals....
The orchestra was playing a Viennese waltz and couple after couple
slipped out upon the floor.
Lounging against the wall, Ryder glowered mockingly through his mask
holes at the motley. It was so exactly as he had foreseen. He was
bored--and he was going to be more bored. He was jostled--and he was
going to be more jostled. He was hot--and he was going to be hotter.
Where in the world was Jinny Jeffries? He deserved, he felt,
exhilaratingly kind treatment to compensate him for this insanity.
He gazed about, and encountering a plump shepherdess ogling him he
stepped hastily behind a palm.
He fairly stepped upon a very small person in black. A phantom-like
small person, with the black silk hubarah of the Mohammedan
high-caste woman drawn down to her very brows, and over the entire
face the black street veil. Not a feature visible. Not an eyebrow.
Not an eyelash, not a hint of the small person herself, except a
very small white, ringed hand, lifted as if in defense of his
clumsiness.
"Sorry," said Ryder quickly, and driven by the instinct of
reparation. "Won't you dance?"
A mute shake of the head.
Well, his duty was done. But something, the very lack of all
invitation in the black phantom, made him linger. He repeated his
request in French.
From behind the veil came a liquidly soft voice with a note of
mirth. "I understand the English, monsieur," it informed him.
"Enough, then, to say yes in it?"
The black phantom shook its head. "My education, alas! has only
proceeded to the N." Her speech was quaint, unhesitating, but oddly
inflected. "I regret--but I am not acquainted with the yes."
A gay character for a masked ball! Indifference and pique swung
Ryder towards a geisha girl, but a trace of irritation lingered and
he found her, "You likee plink gleisha?" singularly witless.
He'd tell McLean just how darned captivating his outfit was, he
promised himself.
And then he caught sight of a familiar pair of gray eyes smiling
over the white veil of an odalisque. Jinny Jeffries was wearing one
of the many costumes there that passed for Oriental, a glittering
assemblage of Turkish trousers and Circassian veils, silver shawls
and necklaces and wide bracelets banding bare arms.
As an effect it was distinctly successful.
"Ten thousand dinars could not pay for the chicken she has eaten,"
uttered Ryder appreciatively in the language of the old slave
market, and stepped promptly ahead of a stout Pantalon.
"Jack! You did come!" There was a note in the girl's voice as if she
had disbelieved in her good fortune. "Oh, and beautiful as Roderick
Dhu! Didn't I tell you that you could find something in that shop?"
she declared in triumph.
"Do you imagine that this came out of a costumer's?" Ryder swung her
swiftly out in the fox trot before the crowd invaded the floor. "If
Andy McLean could hear you! Why this, this is the real thing, the
Scots-wha-hae-wi'-Wallace-bled stuff."
"Who is Andy McLean?"
"Andrew is Scotch, Single, and Skeptical. He is a great pal of mine
and also an official of the Agricultural Bank which is by way of
being a Government institution. These are the togs of his Hieland
Grandsire--"
"Why didn't you bring him?"
"Too dead, unfortunately--grandsires often are--"
"I mean Andrew McLean."
"It would take you, my dear Jinny, to do that. You brought me--and
I can believe in anything after the surprise of finding myself
here."
Jinny Jeffries laughed. "If I could only believe what you say!"
"Oh, you can believe anything I say," Jack obligingly assured her.
"I'm very careful what I _say_--"
"I wish I were."
"You'd have to be careful how you look, Jinny--and you can't help
that. The Lord who gave you red hair must provide the way to elude
its consequences.... I suppose the Orient isn't exactly a manless
Sahara for you?"
She countered, her bright eyes intent, "Is it a girl-less Sahara for
you, Jack?"
"The only woman I have laid a hand on, in kindness or unkindness,
died before Ptolemy rebuilt Denderah."
"That's not right--"
"No? And I thought it such a virtuous record!"
"I mean," Jinny laughed, "that you really ought to be seeing more of
life--like to-night--"
"To-night? Do you imagine this is a place for seeing life?"
"Why not?" she retorted to the irony in his voice. "It's real
people--not just dead and gone things in cases with their lives all
lived. I don't care if you are going to be a very famous person,
Jack, you ought to see more of the world. You have just been buried
out here for two years, ever since you left college--"
Beneath his mask the young man was smiling. A quaint feminine
notion, that life was to be encountered at a masquerade! This motley
of hot, over-dressed, wrought up idiots a human contact!
Life? Living?... Thank you, he preferred the sane young English
officials ... the comradeship of his chief ... the glamor of his
desert tombs.
Of course there was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the
big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching
out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness....
These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the
hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness--but they
gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams to be realized here?
The music stopped and the ever-watchful Pantalon bore down upon
them. Abandoning Jinny to her fate, Ryder sought refuge and a
cigarette.
The hall was crowded now; the ball was a flash of color, a whirl of
satins and spangles and tulle and gauze, gold and green and rose and
sapphire, gyrating madly in vivid projection against the black and
white stripes of the Moorish walls. The color and the music had sent
their quickening reactions among the throng. Masks were lending
audacity to mischief and high spirits.
Three little Pierrettes scampered through the crowd, pelting right
and left with confetti and balloons, and two stalwart monks and a
thin Hamlet pursued them, keeping up the bombardment amid a great
combustion of balloons. A spangled Harlequin snatched his hands
full of confetti and darted behind a palm.
It was the palm of the black phantom, the palm of Ryder's rebuff.
Perhaps the Harlequin had met repulse here, too, and cherished
resentment, not a very malicious resentment but a mocking feint of
it, for when Ryder turned sharply after him--oddly, he himself was
strolling toward that nook--he found Harlequin circling with mock
entreaties about the stubbornly refusing black domino.
"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
dance?" chanted Harlequin, with a shower of confetti flung at the
girl's averted face.
There was such a shrinking of genuine fright in her withdrawal that
Ryder had a fine thrill of rescue.
"My dance," he declared, laying an intervening hand on her muffled
arm.
His tartan-draped shoulder crowded the Harlequin from sight.
She raised her head. The black street veil was flung back, but a
black yashmak was hiding all but her eyes. Great dark eyes they
were, deep as night and soft as shadows, arched with exquisitely
curved brows like the sweep of wild birds' wings.... The most lovely
eyes that dreams could bring.
A flash of relief shone through their childish fright. With sudden
confidence she turned to Ryder.
"Thank you.... My education, monsieur, has proceeded to the Ts," she
told him with a nervous little laugh over her chagrin, drowned in a
burst of louder laughter from the discomfited Harlequin, who turned
on his heel and then bounded after fresh prey.
"Shall we dance or promenade?" asked Ryder.
Hesitatingly her gaze met his. Red and gold and green and blue
flecks of confetti were glimmering like fishscales over her black
wrap and were even entangled drolly in the absurd lengths of her
eye-lashes.
"It is--if I have not forgotten how to dance," she murmured. "If it
is a waltz, perhaps--"
It was a waltz. Ryder had an odd impression of her irresolution
before, with strange eagerness, he swept her into the music. Within
the clumsy bulk of her draperies his arm felt the slightness of her
young form. She was no more than a child.... No child, either, at a
masquerade, but a fairy, dancing in the moonlight.... She was a leaf
blowing in the breeze.... She was the very breeze and the moonlight.
And then, to his astonishment, the dance was over. Those moments had
seemed no more than one.
"We must have the next," he said quickly. "What made you think you
had forgotten?"
"It is nearly four years, monsieur, since I danced with a man."
"With a man? You have been dancing with girls, then?"
She nodded.
"At a school?"
"At a--a sort of school." The black domino laughed with ruefulness.
"At a very dull sort of school."
"To which, I hope, you are not to return?"
She made no answer to that--unless it was a sigh that slipped out.
"At any rate," he said cheerily, "you are dancing to-night."
"To-night--yes, to-night I am dancing!" There was triumph in her
young voice, triumph and faint defiance, and gayety again in her
changing eyes.
Extraordinary, those eyes. Innocent, audacious, bewildering.... To
look down into them produced the oddest of excitement.
He took off his mask. Masks were hindering things--he could see so
much better without.
She, too, could see better--could see him better. Shyly, yet
intently, her gaze took note of him, of the clean, clear-cut young
face, bronzed and rather thin, of the dark hair that looked darker
against the scarlet cap, of the deep-set eyes, hazel-brown, that met
hers so often and were so full of contradictory things ... life ...
and humor ... and frank simplicity ... and subtle eagerness.
He looked so young and confident and handsome....
"You are--a Scotchman?" slipped out from her black yashmak.
"Only in costume. I am an American."
She repeated it a little musingly. "I do not think I ever met an
American young man." She added, "I have met old ones--yes, and
middle-aged ones and the women--but a young one, no."
"A retired spot, that school of yours," said Ryder appreciatively.
"You are French?"
"That is for your imagination!" Teasingly, she laughed. "I am,
monsieur, only a black domino!"
It was the loveliest laugh, Ryder was instantly aware, and the
loveliest voice in the world. Yes, and the loveliest eyes.
He forgot the crowd. He forgot the heat. He forgot--alas!--Jinny
Jeffries. He was aware of an intense exhilaration, a radiant sense
of well-being, and--at the music's beginning--of a small palm
pressed again to his, a light form within his arm ... of shy,
enchanting eyes out from the shrouding black.
"Do put that veil away," he youthfully entreated. "It's quite time.
The others are almost all unmasked."
Her glance about the room returned to him with mock plaintiveness.
She shook her head as they spun lightly about a corner.
"Perhaps, monsieur, I have an unfortunate nose."
"My nerves are strong."
"But why afflict them?" Prankishly her eyes sparkled up at him over
the black veil that made her a mystery. "Enjoy the present,
monsieur!"
"Are you enjoying it?"
Her lashes dropped, like black butterflies. She was a changeling of
a girl, veering from gayety to shyness.... Her gaze was now on her
wrist watch, a slender blaze of platinum and diamonds.
"The present--yes," she said in a muffled little voice.
He bent his head to hear her through the veil.
A tormenting curiosity was assailing him. It had become not enough
to know that she was young and slender, with enchanting eyes and a
teasing spirit of wit.... Vaguely he had thought her to be French,
one of the quaint _jeunes filles_ so rarely taken traveling.
But who was she? A child at her first ball? But what in the world
was she doing, back in the palms, away from her chaperon?
He realized, even in the cloud of his fascination, that French
_jeunes filles_ are not wonted to lurk about palms at a ball.
Was she a little Cinderella, then, slipping among the guests? Some
poor companion, stealing in for fun?... She was too young. And there
was that watch, that glitter of diamonds upon her wrist.
"Have you just come to Cairo?"
She shook her head. "For some time--I have been here."
"Up the Nile yet?"
"The Nile--no, monsieur."
"But you are going?"
"That--that I do not know. Sometime, perhaps."
She sounded guarded.... He hurried into revelations.
"I am staying not far from Cairo, myself. I am an excavator--on an
expedition from an American museum."
"Ah, you dig?"
"Well, not personally.... But the expedition digs.... We've had some
bully finds."
"And you came from America--to dig in the sands?" The black domino
laughed softly. "For how long, monsieur?"
"This is my second year."
Still laughing, she shook her shrouded little head at him. "But I
cannot understand! What wonderful thing do you hope to find--what
buried secret--?"
"Nothing half as wonderful as to know who you are," he said boldly.
"That, too, is--is buried, monsieur!"
"But not beyond discovery," he told her very gayly and confidently,
and danced the music out.
As the last strains died, they paused for an instant as if the spell
still bound them, then his arms fell slowly away, and he heard the
girl draw a quick, startled breath. Her eyes sped to that tiny,
blazing watch; when she lifted them he thought he surprised a gleam
of panic.
"How fast is an hour!" she said with an excited little laugh. "Time
is a--a very sudden thing!"
Sudden, indeed! How long since he had been a badly bored, impatient
young man, mocking the follies of the masquerade? How long since he
had danced with Jinny, flouting her notion of this sort of thing as
life? How long since he had looked into a pair of dark disquieting
eyes ... listened to a gay little voice....
Many important things in life happen suddenly. Juliet happened very
suddenly to Romeo. Romeo happened as suddenly to Juliet.
But Jack Ryder was not remembering anything about Romeo and Juliet.
He was watching that glance steal to the wrist watch again.
Then, as if with a determination of the spirit, they smiled up at
him.
"Monsieur the American," said the black domino, "you have been most
kind to an--an incognita--of a masque. I hope that you dig out of
your sands all the secrets that you most desire."
"You sound as if you were saying good-bye," said Jack Ryder with
quick denial in his blood.
The smile in her eyes flickered.
"Perhaps I have kept you too long from the other guests."
He shook his head. "They don't exist."
"Ah! I will give you the chance to say such nice things to them."
"But I never say nice things--unless I mean them!"
"Never--monsieur?"
"Never. I am very careful what I say," he assured her, even as he
had assured another girl, in what different meaning, hours or
centuries before. "You can believe anything that I say."
"A young man of character! Perhaps that goes with the Scotch
costume. I have read the Scots are a noble people."
"They haven't a thing on the Americans. You must know me better and
discover--"
But again her eyes had gone, almost guiltily, to that watch. And
when she raised them again they were not smiling but very strangely
resolved.
"Monsieur, it is so hot--if you would get me a glass of sherbet?"
"Certainly." Convention brought out the assent; convention turned
him about and marched him dutifully toward the crowded table she
indicated.
But something deeper than convention, some warning born of that
too-often consulted watch and that strange look in her eyes, that
uneasy fear and swift resolve, turned him quickly about again.
Other couples had strolled between them. He hurried through and
stepped back among the palms.
The place was empty. The black domino was gone.
* * * * *
He wasted one minute in assuring himself that she was not hidden in
some corner, not mingled with the crowd. But the niche was deserted
as a rifled nest. Then his eyes spied the door that the green
decorations had conspired to hide and he wrenched it open.
He found himself on a little balcony overlooking the hotel garden.
He knew the place in daytime--palms and shrubs and a graveled walk
and painted chairs where he had drunk tea with Jinny and watched a
Russian tourist beautifully smoking cigarettes.
Now the place was strange. Night and a crescent moon had wrought
their magic, and the garden was a mystery of velvet dusks and ivory
pallors. The graveled path ran glimmering beneath the magnolias.
Over the wall's blankness the eucalyptus defined its crooked lines
against the blue Egyptian sky.
No living thing was there ... nothing ... or did that shadow stir?
There, just at the path's end.
Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of
pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the
huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in
the garden's end.... A moment more and she would have been through.
His hand on her shoulder turned her towards him. Her eyes met his
with a dash of desperation.... He was unconscious how his own were
blazing ... how queerly white his face had gone under its desert
brown.
She was actually running away. She had meant never to see him again.
He had frustrated her, but the blow she had meant to deal him was
still felt.
His voice, when it came, sounded shaken.
"You were going to leave me?"
Strangely her eyes changed. The defiance, the panic fear, faded. A
cloud of slow despair welled up in them.
"What else?" she said very softly.
He did not lose his hold on her. He drew her back into the shadows
with involuntary caution, and he felt her slender body trembling in
his grasp. The tremors seemed to pass into his own.
A sense of urgency was pressing upon him. He was not himself, not
any self that he had known. He stood there, in the Egyptian night,
in the motley of a Scotch chieftain, grasping this mysterious
creature of the masquerade, and he heard a voice that he did not
know ask of her again and again, "But why? Why? Why were you going?"
It was not, he was telling himself, and her eyes were telling him,
as if she wanted to go. He knew what he knew.... Those had been
enchanted hours.... Yet she had deceived and fled from him.
Her eyes looked darkly back at him through the dusk.
"Because I must return to my own life." Her voice was a whisper.
"And I did not want you to know--"
"To know what? Who are you? Where were you going?" A confusion of
conjecture, fantastic, horrible, impossible, was surging in him.
Dim, vague, terrible things....
"Who are you, anyway?"
She looked away from him, to the door which she had tried to gain.
"No masker, monsieur.... For me, there is no unveiling."
Ryder's hand stiffened. He felt his blood stop a moment, as if his
heart stood still.
And then it beat on again in a furious turmoil of contradiction of
this impossible thing that she was telling him.
"That door, monsieur, is to the lane, and in the lane another door
leads to another garden--the garden of a girl you can never know."
He was no novice to Egypt. Even while his credulity was still
battling with belief, his mind had realized this thing that had
happened ... the astounding, unbelievable thing.... He had heard
something of those Turkish girls, daughters of rich officials, whose
lives were such strange opposition of modernity and tradition.
Indulgence and luxury. French governesses and French frocks ...
freedom, travel, often,--Paris, London, perhaps--and then, as the
girl eclipses the child--the veil. Still indulgence and luxury,
still books and governesses and frocks and motors and society--but a
feminine society.
Not a man in it. Not a caller. Not a friend. Not a lover.... Not an
interview, even, with the man who is to be the husband--until the
bride is safe in the husband's home. Hidden women. Secret, secluded
lives.... Extinguished by tradition--a tradition against which their
earlier years only had won modern emancipation.
And she--this slim creature in the black domino--one of those
invisibles?
Stark amazement looked out of his eyes into hers.
"You--a Turk?" he blurted.
"I--a Turk!" Her head went suddenly high; she stiffened with
defensive pride. "I am ashamed--but for the thing I have done. That
is a shameful thing. To steal out at night--to a hotel--to a
ball--And to dance with a man! To tell him who I am--Oh, yes, I am
much ashamed. I am as bold as a Christian!" she tossed at him
suddenly, between mockery and malice.
Still his wonder and his trouble found no words and the shadow on
his face was reflected swiftly in her own.
"I beg you to believe, monsieur, that never before--never have I
done such a thing. My greatest fault was to be out in the garden
after sunset--when all Moslem women should be within. But my nurse
was indulgent."
Almost pleadingly she looked up at the young man. "Believe this of
me, monsieur. I would not have you think of me lightly. But to-night
something possessed me. I had heard of the masque, and I remembered
the balls of the Embassy where I danced when I was so young and so I
slipped away--there was a garden key that I had stolen, long ago,
and kept for another thing.... I did not mean to dance. Only to look
on at the world again."
"Oh, my good Lord," said Jack Ryder.
And then suddenly he asked, "Are you--do you--whom do you live
with?"
And when she answered in surprise, "But with whom but my father--he
is Tewfick Pasha," he drew a long breath.
"I thought you'd tell me next you were married," he said limply.
The next moment they were laughing the sudden, incredibly absorbed
laughter of youth.
"No husband. I am one of the young revoltées--the moderns--and I am
the only daughter of a most indulgent father."
"Well, that's something to the good," was Ryder's comment upon that.
He added, "But if that most indulgent father caught you--"
He looked down at her. The secret trouble of her answering look told
him more than its assumption of courage.
This was no boarding school girl lingering beyond hours.... This was
a high-born Moslem, risking more than he could well know.
The escapade was suddenly serious, tremendously menacing.
She answered faintly, "I have no idea--the thing is so impossible!
But of course," she rallied her spirit to protest, "I do not think
they would sew me in a sack with a stone and drop me in the river,
like the odalisques of yesterday!"
She added, her voice uncertain in spite of her, "I meant only to
stay a moment."
"Which is the way?" said Jack briefly.
With caution he opened the gate into the black canyon of the lane.
Silence and darkness. Not a loiterer, only one of the furtive
starved dogs, slinking back from some rubbish....
The girl moved forward and keeping closely at her side he followed;
they crossed to the other wall, and turned towards the right,
stopping before the deeper shadow of a small, pointed door set into
the heavy brick of the high wall. From her draperies the girl drew
out a huge key.
She fitted it into the ancient lock and turned it; carefully she
pressed open the gate and stared anxiously into the gloom of the
shadowy garden that it disclosed.
Relief colored her voice as she turned to him.
"All is quiet.... I am safe, now.... And so--good-bye, monsieur."
"And this is where you live?" Ryder whispered.
"There--in that wing," she murmured, slipping within the gate, and
he stole after her, and looked across the garden, through a fringe
of date palms, to the outlines of the buildings.
Dim and dark showed the high walls, black as a prison, only here and
there the pale orange oblong of a lighted window.
"Did you climb out the window?" he murmured.
From beneath the veil came a little sound of soft derision.
"But there are always bars, even in the garden windows of the
haremlik!... No, I stole down by an old stair.... That wing, there,
on the right."
Barred on the garden, and on the street the impregnable wooden
screens of the mashrubiyeh, those were the rooms where this girl
beside him was to spend her life--until that most indulgent father
wearied of her modernity and transferred her to other rooms, as
barred and screened, in the palace of some husband!... That thought
was brushing Ryder ... with other thoughts of her present risk ...
of her lovely eyes, visible again, above the veil, thoughts of the
strangeness and unreality of it all ... there in the shrubbery of a
pasha's garden, the pasha's daughter whispering at his side.
"What about your mother--?" he asked her. "Is she--?"
"She is dead," the girl told him, with a drop in her voice.
And after a long moment of silence, "When I was so little--but I
remember her, oh, indeed I do ... She was French, monsieur."
"Oh! And so you--"
"I am French-Turk," she whispered back. "That is very often so--in
the harems of Cairo.... She was so lovely," said the girl wistfully.
"My father must have loved her very much ... he never brought
another wife here. Always I lived alone with my old nurse and the
governesses--"
"You had--lessons?"
"Oh, nothing but lessons--all of that world which was shut away so
soon.... French and English and music and the philosophy--Oh, we
Turks are what you call blue stockings, monsieur, shut away with our
books and our dreams ... and our memories ... We are so young and
already the real world is a memory.... Sometimes," she said, with a
tremor of suppressed passion in her still little tones, "I could
wish that I had died when I was very young and so happy when my
father took me traveling in Europe.... I played games on the decks
of the ships ... I had my tea with the English children.... I went
down into the hold to play with their dogs..."
She broke off, between a laugh and a sigh, "Dogs are forbidden to
Moslems--but of course you know, if you have been here two years....
And emancipated as we may be, there is no changing the customs. We
must live as our grandmothers lived ... though we are not as our
grandmothers are..."
"With a French mother, you must be very far from what some of your
grandmothers were!"
"My poor French mother!" Whimsically the girl sighed. "Must I blame
it on her--the spirit that took me to the ball?... To-morrow
this will be a dream to me.... I shall not believe in my
shamelessness.... And you, too, must forget--"
"Forget?" said Ryder under his breath.
"Forget--and go. Positively you must go now, monsieur. It is very
dangerous here--"
"It is." There was a light dancing in his hazel eyes. "It is more
dangerous every moment--"
"But I mean--" Her confusion betrayed itself.
"But I mean--that you are magic--black magic," he murmured bending
over the black domino.
The crescent moon had found its way through a filigree of boughs.
Faintly its exploring ray lighted the contour of that shrouded head,
touched the lovely curves of her arched brows and the tender pallor
of the skin about those great wells of dark eyes.... From his own
eyes a flame seemed to pass into hers.... Breathlessly they gazed at
each other ... like dim shadows in a garden of still enchantment.
And then, as from a palpable clasp, she tried to slip away. "Truly,
I must go! It is so late--"
Ryder's heart was pounding within him. He did not recognize this
state of affairs; it was utterly unrelated to anything that had gone
before in his merry, humorous, rather clear-sighted and wary young
life.... He felt dazed and wondering at himself ... and
irresponsible ... and appalled ... but deeper than all else, he felt
eager and exultant and strangely, furtively determined about
something that he was not owning to himself ... something that
leaped off his lips in the low murmur to her, "But to-morrow
night--I shall see you again--"
She caught her breath. "Oh, never again! To-night has no
to-morrow--"
"Outside this gate," he persisted. "I shall wait--and other nights
after that. For I must know--if you are safe--"
"See, I am very safe now. For if I were missed there would be
running and confusion--"
He only drew a little closer to her. "To-morrow night--or another--I
shall come to this door--"
"It must not open to you.... It is a forbidden door--forbidden as
that fortieth door in the old story.... There are thirty and nine
doors in your life, monsieur, that you may open, but this is the
forbidden--"
"I shall be waiting," he insisted. "To-morrow night--or another--"
She moved her head in denial.
"Neither to-morrow nor another night--"
Again their eyes met. He bent over her. He knew a gleam of sharpest
wonder at himself as his arms went swiftly round that shrouding
drapery, and then all duality of consciousness was blotted out in
the rush of his young madness. For within that drapery was the soft,
human sweetness of her; his arms tightened, his face bent close, and
through the sheer gauze of her veil his lips pressed her lips....
Some one was coming down the walk: Footsteps crunched the gravel.
Like a wraith the girl was out of his arms ... in anger or alarm
his whirling senses could not know, although it was their passionate
concern. But his last gleam of prudence got him through the gate he
heard her locking after.
And then, for her sake, he fled.