When they were leaving he found himself standing on the steps beside her. The footman had run down the drive to see why her chauffeur, after a wait of more than an hour, wasn't bringing her car round. O'Bannon, who was driving himself in an open car, came out, turning up the collar of his overcoat, and found himself alone with her in the pale light of the waning moon, which gave, as the waning moon always does, the effect of being a strange, unfamiliar celestial visitor. O'Bannon, like so many strict supporters of law, was subject to invasions of lawless impulses. He thought now how easy it would be to run off with a girl like this one and teach her that civilization was not such a complete protection as she thought it. What an outcry she would make, and yet perhaps she wouldn't really object! He had a theory that men and women were more susceptible to emotion in the first minutes of their meeting than at any subsequent time--at least in such first meetings as this. She was standing wrapping her black-and-silver cloak about her with that straight-armed Indian pose. "It's a queer light, isn't it?" she said. He agreed. Something certainly was queer--the greenish silver light on the withered leaves or the mist like a frothy flood on the lawn. Just as she spoke two brighter lights shone through the mist--her car coming up the drive with the footman standing on the step. "Is that yours?" he asked. She nodded, knowing that he was watching her. "Why don't you send it away," he went on very quietly, "and let me drive you home? This is no night for a closed car." He hardly knew whether he had a plan or not, but his pulses beat more quickly as she walked down the steps without answering him. He did not know whether she was going to get into her car and drive away or give orders to the man to go home without her. Then he saw that the footman was closing the door on an empty car and the chauffeur releasing his brake. When she came up the steps he was looking at the moon. "I never get used to its waning," he said, as if he had been thinking of nothing else. She liked that--his not commenting in any way on her accepting an invitation not entirely conventional from a stranger. Perhaps he did not know that it wasn't. Oh, if he could only keep on like that--maintaining that remote impersonality until she herself wanted him to be different! But if he wrapped the lap robe about her with too lingering an arm, or else, flying to the other extreme, began to be friendly and chatty, pretending that there was nothing extraordinary in two strangers being alone like this in a sleeping, moonlit world---- He did neither. When he brought the car to the steps the lap robe was folded back on the seat so that she could wrap it about her own knees. She did so with an exclamation. The mist clung in minute drops to its rough surface. "It's wet," she said.