“Going to bed?”
Jenny paused and turning her head toward the voice she saw the faint glint of Pete’s hat. She went on. “Uhuh,” she replied. The moon was getting up, rising out of the dark water: a tarnished, implacable Venus.
Her aunt came along soon, prowling, peering fretfully into shadowy chairs and obscure corners, implacable and tactless as a minor disease.
“My Lord, what’ve we got to do now?” the niece moaned. She sighed. “She sure makes life real and earnest for everybody, that woman does.”
“Dance, I guess,” Pete answered. The vicious serrated rim of his hat, where the moon fell upon it, glinted dully like a row of filed teeth, like a gaping lithograph of a charging shark.
“Guess so. Say, I’m going to fade out. Stall her off some way, or run yourself would be better.” The niece rose hurriedly. “So long. See you to-m— Oh, you coming too?”
They stepped behind the companionway housing and flattened themselves against it, listening to Mrs. Maurier’s fretful prowling, and clutching Pete’s hand for caution the niece craned her head around the corner. “There’s Dorothy, too,” she whispered and she withdrew her head and they flattened themselves closer yet, clutching hands, while the two searchers passed, pausing to peer into every obscurity.
But they went on, finally, passing from sight, and the niece wriggled her fingers free and moved, and moving found that she had turned into Pete’s arm and against his dark shape and the reckless angle of his hat topping it.
An interval like that between two fencers ere they engage, then Pete’s arm moved with confidence and his other arm came about her shoulders with a technique that was forcing her face upward. She was so still that he stopped again in a momentary flagging of confidence, and out of this lull a hard elbow
