The second picture is of a darkness. A darkness torn here and there by the sudden flame of a match which drove the stars trembling back into the invisible and joined to groping eyes the silky soft blackness of the water. The black night pinned round the world with stars, shouts, laughter, splashings, an empty boat, silence, shrieks, a whisper from the black face of the water, and so home. Total losses: one stocking and one emerald. “I’m so glad, so glad,” she whispered, just before going to sleep against my shoulder, for it was Hugo Cypress who was riding the stork homeward. But I have said that whilst we were on our way riverwards, and I sitting beside Iris as she hurled us headlong through the still night, we stood at enmity, she and I--for Venice! And yet, so far as I could make out, there was not a soul but myself out of that party, Guy, Napier, Venice, Hugo, Shirley, Iris, who seemed in the least degree uncomfortable. Those people had been, throughout dinner and afterwards, completely and supremely normal. For all you knew, I mean, they might have been having fun. There weren’t any undercurrents. Not even what you would call any undercurrents. Those people were quite calmly themselves, they just _behaved_ as themselves in that confoundedly unassailable way which is peculiar to the people of this small island: as though, to be sure, they weren’t giving away anything of a personal nature even to themselves. You can’t help seeing why Napoleon found these people so detestable.