out, she
turned her head languidly.

"I will come in in the next rubber," she said. "You four can start."

They obeyed her, of course, but Lady Peggy shrugged her shoulders
slightly. She had no fancy for Stephen's bridge, and they cut together.
Wilhelmina waited until the soft fall of the cards had ceased, and the
hands were being examined. Then, with a graceful movement, she slipped
out of the window and away into the shadows. No signs of her headache
were left. She passed swiftly along a narrow path, bordered by gigantic
shrubs, until she reached a small iron gate. Here for the first time she
paused.

For several moments she listened. There was no sound from the great
house, whose outline she could barely see but whose long row of lights
stretched out behind her. She turned her head and looked along the
grass-grown lane beyond the gate. There was no one in sight--no sound.
She lifted the latch and passed through.

For a summer night it was unusually dark. All day the heat had been
almost tropical, and now the sky was clouded over, and a south wind, dry
and unrefreshing, was moving against the tall elms. Every few seconds
the heavens were ablaze with summer lightning; once the breathless
silence was broken by a low rumble of distant thunder.

She reached the end of the lane. Before her, another gate led out on to
a grass-covered hill, strewn with fragments of rocks. She paused for a
moment and looked backwards. She was suddenly conscious that her heart
was beating fast; the piquant sense of adventure with which she had
started had given place to a rarer and more exciting turmoil of the
senses. Her breath was coming short, as though she had been running.

The silence seemed more complete than ever. She lifted her foot and felt
the white satin slipper. It was perfectly dry, there was no dew, and as
yet no rain had fallen. She lifted the latch of the gate and passed
through.

The footpath skirted the side of a plantation, and she followed it
closely, keeping under the shelter of the hedge. Every now and then a
rabbit started up almost from under her feet, and rushed into the hedge.
The spinney itself seemed alive with birds and animals, startled by her
light footsteps in the shelter which they had sought, disturbed too by
their instinct of the coming storm. Her footsteps grew swifter. She was
committed now to her enterprise, vague though it had seemed to her. She
passed through a second gate into a ragged wood, a