in the motley of a Scotch chieftain, grasping this mysterious
creature of the masquerade, and he heard a voice that he did not
know ask of her again and again, "But why? Why? Why were you going?"

It was not, he was telling himself, and her eyes were telling him,
as if she wanted to go. He knew what he knew.... Those had been
enchanted hours.... Yet she had deceived and fled from him.

Her eyes looked darkly back at him through the dusk.

"Because I must return to my own life." Her voice was a whisper.
"And I did not want you to know--"

"To know what? Who are you? Where were you going?" A confusion of
conjecture, fantastic, horrible, impossible, was surging in him.
Dim, vague, terrible things....

"Who are you, anyway?"

She looked away from him, to the door which she had tried to gain.

"No masker, monsieur.... For me, there is no unveiling."

Ryder's hand stiffened. He felt his blood stop a moment, as if his
heart stood still.

And then it beat on again in a furious turmoil of contradiction of
this impossible thing that she was telling him.

"That door, monsieur, is to the lane, and in the lane another door