"Better not," said George hastily, "for you would have to give him your name,--your name which I know. For my sake--won't you slip back into the ball-room and submit to the ordeal, as I know it is, of unmasking like the rest? Believe me it is best." "It is my host commands, is it not?" she said slyly, to show him that she had known it was he all the time, and ran past him, in a skittish way. As if he hadn't known all the time that she knew that he knew that she knew who he was! Grown-up people do waste so much time in pretending. Well, I thought if masks were going to be removed, I had better take up a respectable-looking position at once, say, beside Miss Mander, which seemed suitable, and I went in. Then I saw Lady Scilly again, and wanted so to know what she was up to. She was stealing out of the room, and the devil was going with her. He was _The Bittern_ man, of course, only I didn't know she knew him. They were talking very earnestly. "You know the way?" she was asking him. "I know the house, like the inside of a glove," he said, and indeed he did, for hadn't I taken him all over it, the day he interviewed me instead of George, and there was a row? I think he is mischievous, rather like Puck was, in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, so I thought I would stick to them. Lady Scilly wanted to go into an empty room to take off her mask and domino. That I could quite understand, as she had behaved so badly in both. _The Bittern_ man offered to show her the way to George's sanctum. "You see, you can go where you like in a show-house--or ought to be able to. It is public property, the property of the press, at any rate." "The press is too much with us, soon and late," said she, laughing. "Ah, but confess, my lady, you can't do without us!" said this awful young man--though I suppose he has to be cheeky, so as to get his nose in everywhere in the interest of his paper. "You suffer us gladly." "I don't suffer at all--I shouldn't allow you to make me suffer," said she, not understanding him. Smart women never do understand things out of the Bible. I followed them; my excuse was, that I wanted to see they didn't steal the spoons. They made the coolest remarks as they went up-stairs. "I have never been beyond the First Floor in this House of Awe," said _The Bittern_ man. "Haven't you? It seems to get more and more comfortable and less eccentric as one goes up," said Lady Scilly. "Art is only skin-deep," said _The Bittern_ man. "Just look at that bed, which seems to me to have come from nothing more dangerously subversive or artistic than Staple's.... Come, lay down your mask and domino, and let us go down again, and wait about in the back precincts till we hear our host give the word for unmasking."