"Dulce, I think I told you Stephen Gower was coming to-night," says Roger, simply. And then Dulce rises and rustles up to him, and filled with the determination to keep sacred her promise to be particularly nice to Roger's friend, holds out to him a very friendly hand, and makes him warmly welcome. Then Portia makes him a little bow, and Julia simpers at him, and presently he finds himself accepted by and admitted to the bosom of the family, which, indeed, is a rather nondescript one. After a few moments of unavoidable hesitation, he throws himself at Dulce's feet, and, leaning on his elbow, tells himself country life, after all, isn't half a bad thing. "What a heavenly night it is," says Dulce, smiling down on him, still bent on fulfilling her word to Roger. Perhaps she is hardly aware how encouraging her smile can be. "See the ocean down there," pointing with a rounded, soft, bare arm, that gleams like snow in the moonlight, to where the sea is shining between the trees. "How near it seems, though we know it is quite far away." "It is nearer to you than I am," says Mr. Gower, in a tone that might imply the idea that he thinks the ocean in better care than himself. "Well, not just now," says Dulce, laughing. "Not just now," returns he, echoing her laugh. "I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies; but I wish the Fens was a little nearer to this place than it is." "Portia, can you see Inca's Cliff from this?" asks Dulce, looking at her cousin. "You remember the spot where we saw the little blue flowers yesterday, that you so coveted. How clearly it stands out now beneath the moonbeams." "Like burnished silver," says Portia, dreamily, always with a lazy motion wafting her black fan to and fro. "And those flowers--how I longed for them, principally, I suppose, because they were beyond my reach." "Where are they," asks Roger. "I never remember seeing blue flowers there." "Oh! _you_ wouldn't notice them," says his _fiancee_, a fine touch of petulance in her tone, that makes Gower lift his head to look at her; "but they were there nevertheless. They were the very color of the Alpine gentian, and so pretty. We quite fell in love with them, Portia and I, Portia especially; but we could not get at them, they were so low down." "There was a tiny ledge we might have stood on," says Portia, "but our courage failed us, and we would not try it." "And quite right, too," says Sir Mark. "I detest people who climb precipices and descend cliffs. It makes my blood run cold." "Then what made you climb all those Swiss mountains, two years ago?" asks Julia Beaufort, who has a talent for saying the wrong thing, and who has quite forgotten the love affair that drove Sir Mark abroad at that time.