Phyl understanding little, and half drowsed by the warmth and the buzzing of the bees and the voice of the speaker, had given herself up to that lazy condition of mind which is the next best thing to sleep, when she was suddenly aroused. She was seated between Miss Pinckney and Silas. Silas had pinched her little finger. She snatched her hand away, and turned towards him. He was looking away over the pastures; his profile showed nothing but its absolute correctness. Miss Pinckney had noticed nothing, and the Colonel, who had finished with cotton, looking at his watch, declared that it was close on dinner time. After supper that night, Phyl found herself in the garden. Silas had not appeared at supper; the Colonel had brought down a book of old photographs, photographs of people and places dead or changed, and he and Miss Pinckney became so absorbed in them that they had little thought for the girl. She went out to look at the moon, and it was worth looking at, rising like a honey coloured shield above the belt of the eastern woods. The whole world was filled with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes, and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across the cotton fields. Phyl reached the seat where they had all sat that afternoon. It was still warm from the all-day sunshine, and she sat down to rest and listen. The owl had ceased crying, and through the league wide silence faint sounds far and near told of the life moving and thrilling beneath the night; the boom of a beetle, voices from the distant road, and now and then a whisper of wind rising and dying out across the garden and the trees. A faint sound came from behind the seat, and before Phyl could turn two warm hands covered her eyes. She plucked them away and stood up. "I _wish_ you wouldn't do things like that," she cried. "How _dare_ you?" "I couldn't help it," replied the other, "you looked so comfortable. I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you must have heard me coming across the grass." "I didn't--and you shouldn't have done it." "Well, I'm sorry. There, I've apologised, make friends." "There is nothing to make friends about," she replied stiffly. "No, I don't want to shake hands--I'm not angry, let us go into the house." "Don't," said Silas imploringly. "He and she are sitting over that old album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that's why I came to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my mother instead." Phyl forgot her resentment. The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it.