The day had been sultry, and sunset brought no relief. Evening fell windstill, breathless.
For once Katherine was glad to obey her little martinet grandmother's arbitrary regulation: Lights out at nine. She sat by her bedroom window looking out over a white, moonlit world, thinking black thoughts. Suddenly she rose, for no better reason, apparently, than that a quick, inner impulse of impatience against herself, must find vent in some outward act.
"It's dreadful! I'm growing bitter, hard, deceitful. I'm living a lie. Acting as if I were obedient, and respectful to her, and--feeling like a rebel every minute in the day. I've got to end it, somehow. I can't go on like this any longer."
Just outside her window a little balcony (the railed-in roof of the porte-cochère) shone like a silver patch against the darker foliage. The shadows of leaves cast an intricate pattern upon the moonlit space, and Katherine gazed at it abstractedly until a moving speck in the motionless night caught her attention, and fixed it. As she watched, the speck became a shape, the shape an automobile moving rapidly, almost noiselessly, toward the house, along the white ribbon of a driveway. Just before her window it stopped.
Katherine hid a radiant smile in the folds of her shadowy curtain. "Sh!" she cautioned. "You'll wake grandmother."
"Then come down. I've something to tell you."
His instant acceptance of her negative was not altogether agreeable.
One moment, and he was bending over his steering-wheel, busying himself with the gear, probably preparatory to driving on and away. The next, he was out of the car, had scaled the porch-pillar, vaulted the low railing, and was calmly sitting not two feet away from her, Turk-fashion, upon the balcony floor.
Katherine laughed. "I didn't know you could climb like that."
"I can't. That wasn't a climb. 'Twas a scramble. Bad work. But I'm out of practice."
"You mustn't stay. Grandmother wouldn't like it. Remember, she forbade my having anything to do with you."
"Sorry, but I don't feel obliged to conform, on that account. If _you_ don't like it, that's another story."
"The moonlight suggests mystery. Let's leave it a mystery."
"As I diagnose your case, you're by way of 'hating' most things, nowadays. Come. Confess. Aren't you?"