The men were talking politics. Their lifted voices grated upon Peter's thoughts. It was a time of strikes and rioting. Mr. Paragon, as an orator, was urgently requested in the streets of Hamingburgh. He was full of his theme, and extremely angry with Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith was an entirely amiable little man, but he delighted in the phrases of battle. He talked politics in a soldier's terms. He was perpetually storming the enemy's position or turning his rear. The English political situation was in Mr. Smith's view never far removed from war and revolution. He delighted in images of violence. The mildest of small men, whose nerves were shattered by an unexpected noise, he was always ready to talk of the prime duty of governments to stamp out rebellion in blood. Mr. Smith could not pull a cracker at Christmas without shutting his eyes and getting as far as possible from the explosion; but, politically, he was a Prussian. "Shoot them down!" Mr. Smith was repeating a formula by now almost mechanical. To Peter it was desperately familiar. The men's voices every now and then were overborne by Mrs. Smith in one of her perpetual recommendations to Miranda. "Take your elbows off the sill, Miranda." "Yes, mother." Miranda answered with the mechanical obedience of a child who makes allowances. She turned at the same time into the room, full of the contrast between the beauty of the garden and the two absurd figures in dispute upon the hearthrug. She looked over to Peter in the shadow. His eyes were full of her, burning with delight. Miranda, meeting his look, felt suddenly too glad for endurance. She burst from her seat. Her mother's voice, thin and penetrating, was plainly heard above the ground-bass of political argument. "Where are you going, Miranda?" "Into the garden, mother," patiently answered Miranda, and with never a look at Peter she went. The men talked on. Peter quietly followed Miranda into the garden, unnoticed except by his mother. Mrs. Paragon had read the lines of her son's face. She sighed as he slipped away, knowing that at that moment the world held for Peter but one thing really precious. She smiled, not bitterly, but with indulgence, upon the talking fathers. Peter and Miranda sat for many minutes without a word. The evening was perfect, the shining of stars in a violet sky mocked on earth with the shining of great clusters of evening primrose. How full the night seemed! The stars were very secret, but the secret waited to be told. "I shall not be able to bear it," said Miranda suddenly. "Four days," said Peter. "But after that." "Eight weeks at a time." But Miranda's heart sank at the eternity of eight weeks. Protesting with her, Peter at last said: "I'm always with you, Miranda." She turned and found he was looking where Mirza glittered with its companion star. He had written her a poem in which he had likened Mirza to himself, eternally passing through heaven with his tiny friend.