above his own was thrown open. He
stepped back involuntarily, but not before he had caught a few words in
French, spoken apparently by Lady Kitty.

"Ciel! what a night!--and how the flowers smell! And the stars--I adore
the stars! Mademoiselle--come here! Mademoiselle! answer me--I won't
tell tales--now do you--<i>really and truly</i>--believe in God?"

A laugh, which was a laugh of pleasure, ran through Ashe, as he
hurriedly put out his lights.

"Tormentor!" he said to himself--"must you put a woman through her
theological paces at this time of night? Can't you go to sleep, you
little whirlwind?--What's to be done? If I shut my window the noise will
scare her. But I can't stand eavesdropping here."

He withdrew softly from the window and began to undress. But Lady Kitty
was leaning out, and her voice carried amazingly. Heard in this way
also, apart from form and face, it became a separate living thing. Ashe
stood arrested, his watch that he was winding up in his hand. He had
known the voice till now as something sharp and light, the sign surely
of a chatterer and a flirt. To-night, as Kitty made use of it to expound
her own peculiar theology to the French governess--whereof a few
fragments now and then floated down to Ashe--nothing could have been
more musical, melancholy, caressing. A voice full of sex, and the spell
of sex.

What had she been talking of all these hours to mademoiselle? A lady
whom she could never have set eyes on before this visit. He thought of
her face, in the drawing-room, as she had spoken of her sister--of her
eyes, so full of a bright feverish pain, which had hung upon his own.

Had she, indeed, been confiding all her home secrets to this stranger?
Ashe felt a movement of distaste, almost of disgust. Yet he remembered
that it was by her unconventionality, her lack of all proper reticence,
or, as many would have said, all delicate feeling, that she had made her
first impression upon him. Ay, that had been an impression--an
impression indeed! He realized the fact profoundly, as he stood
lingering in the darkness, trying not to hear the voice that thrilled
him.

At last!--was she going to bed?

"Ah!--but I am a pig, to keep you up like this! Allez dormir!" (The
sound of a kiss.) "I? Oh no! Why should one go to bed? It is in the
night one begins to live."

She fell to humming a little French tune, then broke off.

"You remember? You promise? You have the letter?"

Asseverations appar