air was of a dark mahogany
color. The smaller girl wore light gray checks or stripes, and the
shades of silver.

The talk began to be less continuous in the next room, from which there
came the sound of sighs and yawns, and then of mingled laughter at
these. Then the talk ran unbrokenly on for a while, and again dropped
into laughs that recognized the drowse creeping upon the talkers.
Suddenly it stopped altogether, and left Langbourne, as he felt,
definitively awake for the rest of the night.

He had received an impression which he could not fully analyze. With
some inner sense he kept hearing that voice, low and deep, and rich with
whimsical suggestion. Its owner must have a strange, complex nature,
which would perpetually provoke and satisfy. Her companionship would be
as easy and reasonable as a man's, while it had the charm of a woman's.
At the moment it seemed to him that life without this companionship
would be something poorer and thinner than he had yet known, and that he
could not endure to forego it. Somehow he must manage to see the girl
and make her acquaintance. He did not know how it could be contrived,
but it could certainly be contrived, and he began to dramatize their
meeting on these various terms. It was interesting and it was
delightful, and it always came, in its safe impossibility, to his
telling her that he loved her, and to her consenting to be his wife. He
resolved to take no chance of losing her, but to remain awake, and
somehow see her before she could leave the hotel in the morning. The
resolution gave him calm; he felt that the affair so far was settled.

Suddenly he started from his pillow; and again he heard that mellow
laugh, warm and rich as the cooing of doves on sunlit eaves. The sun was
shining through the crevices of his window-blinds; he looked at his
watch; it was half-past eight. The sound of fluttering skirts and flying
feet in the corridor shook his heart. A voice, the voice of the mellow
laugh, called as if to some one on the stairs, "I must have put it in my
bag. It doesn't matter, anyway."

He hurried on his clothes, in the vain hope of finding his late
neighbors at breakfast; but before he had finished dressing he heard
wheels before the veranda below, and he saw the hotel barge drive away,
as if to the station. There were two passengers in it; two women, whose
faces were hidden by the fringe of the barge-roof, but whose slender
figures showed themselves from their neck