Never, he thought, had he known moonlight so pure, so silvery and strong. Shadows of gates and posts lay upon the forward deck like stencils of lamp-black upon white marble. Beyond the boat's bluntly rounded nose the East River stretched its restless, dark reaches, glossy black, woven with gorgeous ribbons of reflected light streaming from pier-head lamps on the further shore. Overhead, the sky, a pallid and luminous blue around the low-swung moon, was shaded to profound depths of bluish-black toward the horizon. Above Brooklyn rested a tenuous haze. A revenue cutter, a slim, pale shape, cut across the bows like a hunted ghost. Farther out a homeward-bound excursion steamer, tier upon tier of glittering lights, drifted slowly toward its pier beneath the new bridge, the blare of its band, swelling and dying upon the night breeze, mercifully tempered by distance. Presently Maitland's attention was distracted and drawn, by the abrupt cessation of its motor's pulsing, to the automobile on his right. He lifted his chin sharply, narrowing his eyes, whistled low; and thereafter had eyes for nothing else. The car, he saw with the experienced eye of a connoisseur, was a recent model of one of the most expensive and popular foreign makes: built on lines that promised a deal in the way of speed, and furnished with engines that were pregnant with multiplied horse-power: all in all not the style of car one would expect to find controlled by a solitary woman, especially after ten of a summer's night. Nevertheless the lone occupant of this car was a woman. And there was that in her bearing, an indefinable something,--whether it lay in the carriage of her head, which impressed one as both spirited and independent, or in an equally certain but less tangible air of self-confidence and reliance,--to set Mad Maitland's pulses drumming with excitement. For, unless indeed he labored gravely under a misapprehension, he was observing her for the second time within the past few hours. Could he be mistaken, or was this in truth the same woman who had (as he believed) made herself free of his rooms that evening? In confirmation of such suspicion he remarked her costume, which was altogether worked out in soft shades of grey. Grey was the misty veil, drawn in and daintily knotted beneath her chin, which lent her head and face such thorough protection against prying glances; of grey suede were the light gauntlets that hid all save the slenderness of her small hands; and the wrap that, cut upon full and flowing lines, cloaked her figure beyond suggestion, was grey. Yet even its ample drapery could not dissemble the fact that she was quite small, girlishly slight, like the woman in the doorway; nor did aught temper her impersonal and detached composure, which had also been an attribute of the woman in the doorway. And, again, she was alone, unchaperoned, unprotected....