Somebody interrupted and we did not mention Pake again until after supper. Then we were all out on the long front porch, grouped about Susie. Buck and Tom Brundige and I, scattered among the ladies, had our cigars drawing well. Rex, as always, was smoking one cigarette after another. A V. M. I. cadet, a crony of one of Anna’s boys, was seated on one rail of the rustic bridge over the brook, twanging a banjo at three girls who sat on the other rail facing him. In the lulls of our talk and of the banjo, the chuckle of the brook over its pebbles emphasized the silence, into which broke the undertones of a pair of lovers, swinging in a hammock off to the right. The stars twinkled through the tree-tops, the cigar ends glowed red in the darkness, which was cloven by shafts of lamplight from the windows and mitigated afar to the left where, over the long black outline of the Blue Ridge a paling sky prophesied moonrise. Somebody had been expecting a letter and had been disappointed and was mourning over it. “I don’t understand about letters from Pake,” Susie remarked. “Sometimes we don’t get any letters for weeks, and then we get two or three, all at once. When we compare dates and postmarks we find that he writes every Wednesday and Saturday and mails the letters the very day they are written. How do you explain that, Billy?” “I suppose,” I said, “that the letters come different ways, perhaps some by Lisbon, some by London, others perhaps other ways. That might explain it. What do you think, Tom?” “I fancy,” said Brundige, “that you are probably right.” “I had a letter from Pake to-day,” Susie went on. “I had not heard from him for a month. He says he don’t like his business quarters. He has an expensive office and he says it is dark and hot and stuffy and he is going to change just as soon as he can find something to suit him. He says he is looking round. But he says he is most comfortably located otherwise. He is boarding, as he expresses it, ‘up on Santa Teresa’; what does that mean, Billy?” “Big, long hill,” I replied. “Four hundred feet high. Splendid view over the city and harbor. Fine air all night. Lots of places to board up there, and all good. How’s that now, Tom?” “All correct,” Brundige corroborated me. “I should think,” Rex put in, “that Pake would get into trouble down there.” “What sort of trouble?” Anna demanded. “Pake never gets into trouble anywhere. What sort of trouble do you mean?” Rex lit another cigarette. “Oh,” he said, “I meant that down there those Dago Portuguese won’t stand any nonsense. They’re a revengeful lot, by what I hear. Pake might cut somebody out with a girl and get a knife stuck in him.” “You’re teasing!” cried Anna, indignantly. “You’re always up to some teasing! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And Susie rebuked him: “You oughtn’t to suggest such awful things, Rex.”