Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht. Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht--was it for this that he had begged the assistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of note-paper on a hearth. Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. "There was another Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning," he vouchsafed. "Politics?" "Said the reform movement was a joke." "Good one?" "Good movement, you mean?" "No--good joke." "No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circumstances whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature." "I see." "I'm going up there to-morrow," said Peter, nodding toward the town, "and look into it a little. If there is time, I may even decide to show these fellows how a reform proposition ought to be handled to ensure results." Far off on the hill a single light twinkled through the trees, very yellow against the pale moonlight. Varney's eye fell upon it and absently held it. It was Mary Carstairs's light, though, of course, he had no means of knowing that. Presently Peter lolled around and looked at him. "H'm! Sunk in a sodden slumber, I suppose?" "Not at all. Interested by your conversation--fascinated. Ha! Here is something to vary the evening's monotony. A row-boat is drifting down-stream towards us. Let us make little wagers with each other as to who'll be in it." He looked over his shoulder upward at the moon, which a flying scud of cloud had momentarily veiled. Peter, who had sat down again, glanced up the river. "I don't see any boat." "There is where the wager comes in, my son. Hurry up--the moon will pop out in another minute, and spoil the sport." "Drifting, you say. Bet you she's empty--broke away from her moorings and riding down with the current. Bet you half a dollar. My second bet," he said, warming to the work, "is an old washerwoman and her little boy, out on their rounds collecting clothes. It's Monday. In case both firsts are wrong, second choices get the money." "My bet is--Ha! Stand ready with your half! There she comes--Jove!" "Good God!" cried Peter and sprang up.