The flagged quadrangle, walled in with darkness and worn with the tread of numberless women's feet, showed silver-grey in the light of a moon nearing the full; and above it, in a square patch of sky, stars sparkled with a veiled radiance like diamonds caught in a film of gossamer. As Elsie emerged from the shadow of the verandah, she had a sense of stepping into an unreal world, and the Palace walls, shutting out the familiar contours of earth, strengthened the illusion. The night seemed the accomplice of her mood, in league with her own exquisite sensibility; a night created for sheltering tenderness. Michael Maurice, divining her sensations with the uncanny accuracy of his type, pressed a little closer to her as they walked, so that now and again, as if by chance, his arm brushed her own, and each contact quickened her happy commotion of heart and pulse. They came upon a rough stone bench, and he paused. "It is pleasanter to sit, _n'est-ce pas_?" "Yes. But we mustn't sit long." "Mustn't we? How does one measure time on such a night as this? By the beating of hearts, or by the pulsations of stars?" She laughed softly. "How foolish you are!" "It is good to be foolish at the right time, and with the right person! Wisdom is the death's-head at the feast of life. But we are going to shut her outside the door for a whole week--you and I." The strangely sweet magic of those linked pronouns stirred Elsie as never before; though the sound of them had pleased her once, not a little, on the lips of Kenneth Malcolm. Bud she answered lightly, as women will, when they feel barriers giving way. "I never knew I had agreed to anything so desperate!" He had laid his arm along the back of the seat; so that his hand was within an inch of her shoulder. He moved it closer. "You have done more than that without knowing it--_petite amie_," he said, yielding himself, as always, to the witchery of the moment. "It is your doing that I have achieved an inspired picture. It is your doing that I want this week in Arcadia to be an idyll we shall neither of us forget--an idyll of sunlight, moonshine, and blessed freedom from _les convenances_. No past--no future--only the present; and in it two spirits tuned to one key. That is the secret of perfect enjoyment." She shook her head. "I don't quite understand. It sounds too fantastic. The past and the future are there always. One can't get rid of them." "But one can shut the door on them when they threaten to disturb the present, which is the great reality after all." "Can one? You seem to have a talent for shutting doors!" "A convenient talent; worth cultivating! You may take my word for it." Something in the statement or its manner of utterance jarred, ever so slightly,--threatened to break the charm that held her. "Dangerously convenient," she murmured, in gentle reproof. "Little Puritan! What a narrow track you walk upon. Hardly room on it for two abreast. Is there?"