e, playing false?
Which way are you going?"

She burst into laughter, she caught Roddy by the arm. "Oh! I've talked
such nonsense--It's getting cold--we've got to go in. Don't think I talk
like that generally, Sir Roderick, because I don't--I----"

She was nervous, frightened. The stars were so many and it was so dark
and Roddy no longer seemed a protection.

"I know it's late--Look here, I'm going to run--Race me----"

She tore for her very life out of the little wood, felt him pounding
behind her, seized, with a gasp of relief, the lights and the voices--

She knew, with joy, that Roddy was closing the door behind her and that
the garden and the stars and the wood were shut into silence.

For a little while, in the drawing-room, she talked excitedly, laughed a
great deal, even at Monty Carfax's jokes.

She knew that they were all thinking that she was pleased because she
had been with Roddy. She did not care what their thoughts were.

At last in her room she cried to Lucy--"Pull the curtains
tight--Tighter--Tighter--Those stars--they'll get through anything."

When at last Lucy was gone she lit her candle and lay there, hearing the
clocks strike the hours, wondering when the day would come.

CHAPTER XIII

DEFIANCE OF THE TIGER--II

I

Roddy, dozing after a night of glorious sleep, lay on his back and swung
happily to and fro.

The footman who was valeting him had pulled up the blind and drawn aside
the curtains, and the garden came to him, not as on last evening,
weighed with its canopy of stars, but now asserting its own happiness
and colour and freshness.

The man said: "The bathroom is the last door down the passage on your
right, sir. Breakfast is at half-past nine. It has just gone eight. What
clothes, sir?"

Roddy stared at him and smiled. After a little time, the man enquired
again: "Which suit will you wear this morning, sir?"

"Dark blue." Roddy, still happily floating somewhere near the
ceiling--floating with delicious lightness--"Dark blue--Dark blue--Dark
blue----"

For a little while the man, a strange vague shape, pulled out drawers
and closed them and walked about the floor, like Agag, delicately.
Roddy, from the ceiling watched him and resented the fact that every
sharp click of a drawer pulled him nearer to the carpet.

The man's final shutting of the bedroom door plumped Roddy into his bed,
wide awake.

"Damn him! What a wonderful day!"

He lay back and watched how