THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
the piazza rail where the only shadow extended was a narrow band like a ribbon, past the steps where the first night she appeared to him as an arm extended out of darkness, and round the corner of the old wing, coming out before the front of the greater house.
"Where are we going?" he whispered.
"Sh-h-h!" She clung to the wall, holding them both still, listening. It was only the owl that had spoken. She put her lips close to Carron's ear. "Follow me around the edge of the clearing. Do exactly as I do. Don't speak."
The hotel with all its windows looked blank and dead as the face of a rock. It buttressed them from the live part of the house. In its shelter she ran fearlessly, but with remarkably light noiseless steps, and slipped into the trees on the left side of the drive. Here he had ado to keep her in sight. Now the white back of a neck gleamed, now a hand shone, laid an instant against a tree trunk; but chiefly he tracked her as an animated shadow gliding rapidly among shadows that were still, and leaving a waving of branches in its wake. She slid down the bank with a cascading of earth into the road just at the point where it turned from the clearing to descend the hill; and they stood together in the same place where Carron and Ferrier had stood that morning.
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