In fact, it was almost bedtime. Frances and I sat before the hearth in the library, looking silently into the red heart of the dying embers of fragrant pine cones. For in the heights of the Pocantico Hills it often is chilly on summer nights. My darling sat on a low _fauteuil_, her chin resting upon her hand, her beautiful eyes fixed dreamily, inscrutably, upon the fading coals. In her lap lay the spread of the crimson pajamas. She was thinking--thinking--I wondered what! And I was thinking how jolly rum it all was; that Francis wasn't Frances, that the professor wasn't Billings, Colonel Francis Kirkland wasn't Foxy Grandpa and wasn't the frump's father after all; and that the frump, herself--bless her, her name was Elizabeth--wasn't Frances, and wasn't a frump at all, but just a jolly, nice, homely old dear, you know. And I was trying to catch and hold some of the deuced queer things the professor had discoursed upon about ancient Oriental what's-its-name, and astral bodies, obsession, psychical research and all that sort of thing. Somehow, dash it, it had all seemed devilish unreasonable and improbable to _me_--couldn't get hold of it, you know; but as everybody else had said "Ah-h-h!" and had wagged their heads as though they understood, I just said: "Dash it, of course, you know!" and recrossed my legs and took a fresher grip on my monocle. The most devilish hard thing to get hold of had been that Frances had never sat on the arm of my Morris chair, had never told me she liked me better than any man she had ever met, and had never called me "Dicky" at any time or anywhere. I wondered if she ever would, and how the deuce fellows went about it when they proposed to the girl they madly loved. I was devilish put out, you know, that I had never tried it so I _could_ know. From across the hall droned the voices from the smoking-room--Colonel Kirkland and the judge debating something about treaty ports and the Manchurian railway. Through the French windows from the open loggia came the eager, pitched tones of the professor and the frump--no, Elizabeth, I mean--discussing Aldeberan and Betelguese, dead suns, star clusters and the nebular hypothesis. Within the room Billings had snapped out the lights, to bring out the blazing fire of his treasured ruby, and from the tray in the dark corner where he was closing it in his collection vault, it gleamed like the end of a bright cigar. The other four were absently clutched in my darling's hand and the crimson shine gleamed bravely through her finger bars. "Carbuncles--ancient carbuncles," the professor had called them, "that the Chinese believed their dragons carried in their mouths, in their black caves in days of old, to furnish light whereby they could see to devour their victims." And _that_ I believed, for I could see some practical sense about it! "What _I_ should like to know," said the dear, precious cub, hugging his knee by the mantel, "is where _I_ come in!"