She laughed too, framed her cheeks in her hands, and looked down at him with smiling, humorous eyes which grew subtly tender.
"Why should _I_? I don’t. I know I care for you more than everything else in the world——
"You know—people happening to overhear you might not understand——"
"I don’t care! It’s the truth!" She rose, bent over the banister to look down at him, discovered that he was not annoyed, smiled adorably.
"Good night! I shall sleep happily!" she whispered, gathering her boudoir robe around her.
At the top of the stairs she turned, leaned over, kissed the palm of one slim hand to him, and disappeared with a subdued and faintly mischievous laugh, leaving in his eyes of an artist a piquant, fleeting, and charming picture.
But upon his mind the impression she left began to develop more slowly—the impression of a young girl—"clean as a flame," as he had once said of her—a lovely and delicate personality absolutely in keeping with the silken boudoir gown she wore—in keeping with the carven and stately beauty of her environment in this ancient house.
Philippa not only fitted into the very atmosphere of such a place; it seemed as though she must have been born in it, so perfectly was she a harmonious part of it, so naturally and without emphasis.
Centuries had coördinated, reconciled, and made a mellow ensemble of everything within this house—the walls, the wainscot, mantels, lusters, pictures and frames, furniture and dimmed upholstery.
In the golden demi-light of these halls Philippa moved as though she had known no other—and in the sunlight of music room or terrace she belonged as unquestioned as the sunlight itself; and in lamplit spaces where soft shadows framed her, there also she belonged as certainly as the high, dim portraits of great ladies and brave gentlemen peering down at her through their delicate veils of dust.
Thinking of these things beside the open window of his bedroom, he looked out into the south and east and saw in the sky the silvery pencilings of searchlights on the Barrier Forts, shifting, sweeping in wide arcs, or tremblingly concentrated upon the clouds.
There was no sound in the fragrant darkness, not a breath of air, not a leaf stirring.
His inclination was not to sleep, but to think about Philippa; and he sat there, a burned-out cigarette between his fingers, his eyes fixed so persistently on the darkness that after a while he became conscious of what his concentration was delicately evoking there—her face, and the grey eyes of her, shadowy, tender, clear as a child’s.