The apprehension which now for two days had been eating like a furtive cancer into her mind suddenly grew and contaminated the whole of her consciousness; she could not understand his levity, for she had not concealed from him the sinister misgiving. "Yes!" she murmured with a sort of charming and victimized protest. "That’s all very well, but----" And she stopped, and the smile expired from her face. He shrugged his shoulders, gave a short, affectionate, humouring laugh, and said with kind superiority, utterly positive: "What have I told you? The thing’s absolutely imposs!" And just as suddenly she was quite reassured and the apprehension vanished away. It could not exist against his perfect certitude. She lit up a new smile. "Look here," he went on, "we’ll dine in the Casino if we can. Of course, every blessed table may be booked, but I’ll have a try." A quarter of an hour later, when she had begun to dress, he returned with the exciting information that, at precisely the right instant, somebody had telephoned to countermand an inside table and he had secured it. They arrived very late in the Casino restaurant, yet more diners came after them than had come before, so that ultimately it would have been difficult to draw a straight line between dinner and supper. The stars in the arched firmament of the vast and lofty hall challenged the stars of heaven in number and splendour, and seemed to win easily. Light fell in glittering floods on the flowered tables and on the shoulders of the women. In the centre of the floor was an oblong parquet sacred to dancing. The band, in which Englishmen and varied dagoes were mingled, sat, clothed apparently in surplices, on a daïs in a mighty alcove. The drummer and the banjoist each procured an unnatural union of light and sound by electric illumination of their instruments from within. The leader wore a battered opera hat, and at the end of a piece he would exclaim grimly and scornfully, "So that’s that!" or, "We are the goods!" or some such phrase. Now and then the band overflowed into song, and the wild chants of the Marquesas or the Fiji Islands rang riotously through the correctness of the restaurant, and Lilian caught fragments of significant verse, such as: "The rich get rich, And the poor get children, Ain’t we got fun?" showing that one touch of nature makes the Southern archipelago the very sister and bride of Europe.