“Y--yes.... I suppose so. Or gardenias.... Oh, the fire-flies! Look... there, against that splash of moonlight on the water. Apples of silver in a net-work of gold....” They leaned together, one flesh from shoulder to finger-tips, their eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples. “I could bear,” Lansing remarked, “even a nightingale at this moment....” A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long liquid whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above their heads. “It’s a little late in the year for them: they’re ending just as we begin.” Susy laughed. “I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye to each other as sweetly.” It was in her husband’s mind to answer: “They’re not saying good-bye, but only settling down to family cares.” But as this did not happen to be in his plan, or in Susy’s, he merely echoed her laugh and pressed her closer. The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the moon was turning from gold to white in a sky powdered with vanishing stars. Across the lake the lights of a little town went out, one after another, and the distant shore became a floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a great white moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The nightingales had paused and the trickle of the fountain behind the house grew suddenly insistent. When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. “I have been thinking,” she said, “that we ought to be able to make it last at least a year longer.” Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought. “You mean,” he enquired after a pause, “without counting your grandmother’s pearls?” “Yes--without the pearls.” He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper: “Tell me again just how.” “Let’s sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best.” He stretched himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on a heap of boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee. Just above her, when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of moon-flooded sky incrusted like silver in a sharp black patterning of plane-boughs. All about them breathed of peace and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so acute that it was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of bills and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared. “People with a balance can’t be as happy as all this,” Susy mused, letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.