She went to the table and blew out the candles. "What are you doing now?" "Blowing out the lights; it's so much nicer sitting in the moonlight. Fill your glass and sit down beside me." "Extraordinary child," thought Mr Bevan, doing as he was bid, whilst she opened the window wide to "let the moon in." Other things came too, a night moth and a perfume of decaying leaves, the souls of last year's sun-flowers and hollyhocks were abroad to-night; the distant paddock seemed full of cats, to judge by the sounds that came from it, and bats were flickering in the air. The voice of Boy-Boy, metallic and rhythmical as the sound of a trip hammer, came from a distant corner of the garden where he had treed a cat. "Quick," said Fanny, drawing in her head and pulling her companion by the arm, "and you'll be in time to see our tortoise." Charles regarded the quadruped without emotion. "I don't see the necessity for such frightful haste." "Still, if you'd been a moment sooner the moonlight would have been on him; he was shining a moment ago like silver. Do you know what a tortoise is? it's a sign of age. You and I will be some day like that tortoise, without any teeth, wheezing and coughing and grubbing along; and may-be we will look back and think of this night when we were young--Oh, dear me, I wish I were dead!" "Why, why, what's the matter now--Fanny?" "I don't want to grow old," pouted Miss Lambert. "When two people grow old together," began Mr Bevan in whose brain the punch was at work, "they do not notice the--that is to say, age really does not matter. Besides, a woman is only as old as she feels--I mean as she looks." The fumes of the punch of a sudden took on themselves a form as of the pale phantom of Pamela Pursehouse, and the phantom cried, "Begone, flee from temptation whilst you may." Before him the concrete form of Miss Lambert sitting in the corner of the window-seat and bathed in moonlight, said to him, "Hug me." Her eyes were resting upon him, then she gazed out at the garden and sighed. Charles took her hand: it was not withdrawn. "I must be going now," he said. She turned from the garden and gazed at him in silence. A few minutes later, feeling clouds beneath his feet and all sorts of new sensations around his heart, he was walking down the weed-grown avenue, Boy-Boy at his heels barking and snarling, satisfied no doubt by some preternatural instinct that do what he might he would not be kicked. Ere he had reached the middle of the avenue he heard a voice calling, "Cousin Charley!" "Yes, Fanny." "Come back soon!" CHAPTER II THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE "THE LAURELS, 11 P.M.