She was laughing, but in her heart that other woman in her was stirring. For a startled, trembling second the wood seemed to flame, the gardens to blaze with the challenge: "Are you, for the sake of the comfort and safety of life, playing false? Which way are you going?" She burst into laughter, she caught Roddy by the arm. "Oh! I've talked such nonsense--It's getting cold--we've got to go in. Don't think I talk like that generally, Sir Roderick, because I don't--I----" She was nervous, frightened. The stars were so many and it was so dark and Roddy no longer seemed a protection. "I know it's late--Look here, I'm going to run--Race me----" She tore for her very life out of the little wood, felt him pounding behind her, seized, with a gasp of relief, the lights and the voices-- She knew, with joy, that Roddy was closing the door behind her and that the garden and the stars and the wood were shut into silence. For a little while, in the drawing-room, she talked excitedly, laughed a great deal, even at Monty Carfax's jokes. She knew that they were all thinking that she was pleased because she had been with Roddy. She did not care what their thoughts were. At last in her room she cried to Lucy--"Pull the curtains tight--Tighter--Tighter--Those stars--they'll get through anything." When at last Lucy was gone she lit her candle and lay there, hearing the clocks strike the hours, wondering when the day would come. CHAPTER XIII DEFIANCE OF THE TIGER--II I Roddy, dozing after a night of glorious sleep, lay on his back and swung happily to and fro. The footman who was valeting him had pulled up the blind and drawn aside the curtains, and the garden came to him, not as on last evening, weighed with its canopy of stars, but now asserting its own happiness and colour and freshness. The man said: "The bathroom is the last door down the passage on your right, sir. Breakfast is at half-past nine. It has just gone eight. What clothes, sir?" Roddy stared at him and smiled. After a little time, the man enquired again: "Which suit will you wear this morning, sir?" "Dark blue." Roddy, still happily floating somewhere near the ceiling--floating with delicious lightness--"Dark blue--Dark blue--Dark blue----" For a little while the man, a strange vague shape, pulled out drawers and closed them and walked about the floor, like Agag, delicately. Roddy, from the ceiling watched him and resented the fact that every sharp click of a drawer pulled him nearer to the carpet. The man's final shutting of the bedroom door plumped Roddy into his bed, wide awake. "Damn him! What a wonderful day!" He lay back and watched how waves of light danced on the walls. A fountain splashed in the gardens and the long mirror on the right of the bed had in it the corner of the green lawn and the cool grey stones of an old wall.