enough at first; but"--and here Lady Adela smiled demurely--"I
think her courage gave way. The boy's dress looked charming as Rose
sketched it for her--and the long cloak made it quite proper, you
know--and very picturesque, too--but--but I think she's frightened. We
can't count on her. So we may have to call on you for Palaemon, Mr.
Lestrange."

"And I have taken the liberty of cutting out the song, for it's rather
stupid," said Lionel Moore, "so you've only got a few lines to repeat."

"The fewer the better," replied Mr. Percy Lestrange, who was possibly
right in considering that, with his far-from-regular features and his
red hair and moustache, his appearance as a handsome young swain should
not have too much prominence given it.

Notwithstanding that it had been Miss Lestrange's audacious proposal
that they should go masquerading in the open air, she was a wise young
virgin, and she took care before going out to thrust a soft silk
handkerchief into the square opening of her dress; the Ladies Sybil and
Rosamund followed her example by drawing lace scarfs round their necks
and shoulders; it was the young matron who was reprehensibly careless,
and who, when the French windows were thrown open, went forth boldly,
and without any wrap at all, into the cool air of the dawn. But for a
second, as they stood on the little stone balcony above the steps
leading down to the garden, this group of revellers were struck silent.
The world looked so strange around them. In the mysterious gray light,
that had no sort of kindly warmth in it, the grass of the lawn and the
surrounding trees seemed coldly and intensely green; and cold and
intense, with no richness of hue at all, were the colors of the flowers
in the various plots and beds. Not a bird chirped as yet. Not a leaf
stirred. But in this ghostly twilight the solitary gas lamps were
beginning to show pale; and in the southern heavens the silver sickle of
the moon, stealing over to the west, seemed to be taking the night with
it, and leaving these faintly lilac skies to welcome the uprising of the
new day.

At first, indeed, there was something curiously uncanny--something
unearthly and phantasmal almost--in the spectacle of these figures, the
women in white, the men in black, moving through this wan light; and
their voices sounded strangely in the dead silence; but ere long a soft
saffron tinge began to show itself in the east; one or two scraps of
cloud in the violet skies