a Persian
carpet. Roofs sloped beyond it, and beyond these the diagram of streets
and houses, and empty unbuilt grassy lots.

She looked down upon all, as lone and lonely as a deserted lady in a
tower, lifted above these happy, peaceful things by her strange
responsibility. Her thoughts could not stay with them; her eyes traveled
seaward. She parted the curtains and, leaning a little out, looked
westward at the white sea gate.

A whistle, as of some child calling his mate, came sweetly in the
silence. It was near, and the questing, expectant note caught her ear.
Again it came, sharper, imperative, directly beneath her. She looked
down; she was speechless. There was a sudden wild current of blood in
her veins. There he stood, the whistler, neither child nor bird, but the
man himself--Kerr, looking up at her from the gay oval of her garden.
She hung over the window-sill. She looked directly down upon him,
foreshortened to a face, and even with the distance and the broad glare
of noon between them she recognized his aspect--his gayest, of diabolic
glee. There lurked about him the impish quality of the whistle that had
summoned her.

"Come down," he called.

All sorts of wonders and terrors were beating around her. He had
transcended her wildest wish; he had come to her more openly, more
daringly, more romantically than she could have dreamed. All the
amazement of why and how he had braved the battery of the windows of
her house was swallowed up in the greater joy of seeing him there,
standing in his "grays," with stiff black hat pushed off his hot
forehead, hands behind him, looking up at her from the middle of
anemones and daffodils.

"Come down," he called again, and waved at her with his slim, glittering
stick. How far he had come since their last encounter, to wave at and
command her, as if she were verily his own! She left the window, left
the room, ran quickly down the stair. The house was hushed; no passing
but her own, no butler in the hall, no kitchen-maid on the back stair.
Only grim faces of pictures--ancestors not her own--glimmered
reproachful upon her as she fled past. Light echoes called her back
along the hall. The furniture, the muffling curtains, her own reflection
flying through the mirrors, held up to her her madness, and by their
mute stability seemed to remind her of the shelter she was
leaving--seemed to forbid.

She ran. This was not shelter; it was prison. He was rescue; he was
light itsel