d foot. And the others seemed to wait upon her
pleasure in a silence almost of subjugation--a nervous, unnatural,
ominous hush.

It was broken on Sally's entrance by the mistress of Gosnold House,
who nodded without a sign of recognition and said in a bleak manner
thus far in Sally's experience wholly foreign to the nature of the
speaker: "Come in, please, shut the door, and find some place to sit
down. Retain your mask. There are two guests wanting, and we must wait
for them."

There were no chairs vacant, and a majority of the men were already
standing, but another (by whose unquestionably authentic cowboy
costume Sally was sure she recognised Trego) rose and silently
surrendered to her his place.

She accepted it with a stifled murmur of thanks.

The slight stir occasioned by her addition to the company subsided,
and the sense of constraint became even more marked. Nobody appeared
to care to know his neighbour; there was no whispering, no murmuring,
even the indispensable fidgeting was accomplished in an apprehensive
and apologetic manner. A few men breathed audibly, a few fans
stirred imperceptibly an atmosphere supercharged with radiations from
so many human bodies added to the natural heat of a summer's evening;
there were no other sounds or movements of any consequence. Sally
became uncomfortably susceptible to the undercurrent of high nervous
tension, conscious of a slight dew on her hands and forehead, and
surprisingly conscious of the sonorous thumping of her heart.
Unaccountably, nobody else seemed to hear it.

Perhaps they were all listening to their own hearts. But why . . .?

She wasted a few moments vainly scrutinising the masks in her
immediate neighbourhood. Their eyes gleamed uncannily through the
slits in the black silk, and when she intercepted a direct glance, it
was hastily lowered or averted, as if there were something indecorous
in acknowledging her bewildered appeal.

Again, perhaps, they were as much puzzled by her incognito as she was
by theirs.

Those small shapes of black, silk-covered cardboard proved singularly
effective, even when they concealed no more than the nose and the
cheeks immediately beneath the eyes. She found it surprisingly
difficult to fix an identification, even when satisfied she could not
be in error; but she was measurably sure of Mrs. Artemas beneath
Diana's Grecian draperies, of Trego in his Western guise, of Mercedes
Pride in the conventional make-up of a w