"Every perfect thing stops!" Elizabeth sighed to David. They had left the porch, and gone down on to the sands flooded with moonlight and silence. The evening was very still and warm, and the full blue pour of the moon made everything softly unreal, except the glittering path of light crossing the breathing, black expanse of water. David had hesitated when she had suggested leaving the others and coming down here by themselves,--then he had looked at Nannie, sitting between Robert Ferguson and his mother, and seemed to reassure himself; but he was careful to choose a place on the beach where he could keep an eye on the porch. He was talking to Elizabeth in his anxious way, about his work, and how soon his income would be large enough for them to marry. "The minus sign expresses it now," he said; "I could kick myself when I think that, at twenty-six, my mother has to pay my washwoman!" Their engagement had continued to accentuate the difference in the development of these two; David's manhood was more and more of the mind; Elizabeth's womanhood was most exquisitely of the body. When he spoke of his shame in being supported by his mother, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder, careless of the three spectators on the porch, and said softly, "David, I love you so that I would like to scrub floors for you." He laughed; "I wouldn't like to have you scrub floors, thank you! Why in thunder don't I get ahead faster," he sighed. Then he told her that the older men in the profession were "so darned mean, even the big fellows, 'way up," that they kept on practising when they could just as well sit back on their hind legs and do nothing, and give the younger men a chance. "They are nothing but money-grabbers," Elizabeth agreed, burning with indignation at all successful physicians. "But David, we can live on very little. Corn-beef is very cheap, Cherry-pie says. So's liver." Up on the porch the conversation was quite as practical as it was down by the moonlit water: "Elizabeth is to have a little bit of money handed over to her on her next birthday," Mr. Ferguson was saying; then he twitched the black ribbon of his glasses and brought them tumbling from his nose; "it's an inheritance from her father." "Oh, how exciting!" said Nannie. "Will it make it possible for them to be married any sooner?" "They can't marry on the interest on it," he said, with his meager laugh; "it's only a nest-egg."