“Hum—Hygiene. I find it here—public health, sanitary by-laws; hum—hum—sewage systems. I think we shall discover what we want. Ah, here it is!” “The matron told me——” “Yes, exactly. They had to burn pastilles. Hum—hum—septic tank. My dear, what is a septic tank?” “Something not quite as it should be.” “Ah, exactly! I understand. Hum—let me see. Their tank must be very septic. That accounts for—hum—for the odour.” Canterton watched them over the top of his book. He could see his wife’s face plainly. She was frowning and biting the end of the pen, and fidgeting with the paper. He noticed the yellow tinge of the skin, and the eager and almost hungry shadow lines that ran from her nose to the corners of her mouth. It was a passionless face, angular and restless, utterly lacking in any inward imaginative glow. Gertrude Canterton rushed at life, fiddled at the notes with her thin fingers, but had no subtle understanding of the meaning of the sounds that were produced. Mrs. Brocklebank read like a grave cleric at a lectern, head tilted slightly back, her eyes looking down through her pince-nez. “The bacterial action should produce an effluent that is perfectly clear and odourless. My dear, I think—hum—that there is a misconception somewhere.” Neither of them noticed that Canterton had left them, and had disappeared through the French window into the garden. A full moon had risen, and in one of the shrubberies a nightingale was singing. The cedar of Lebanon and the great sequoia were black and mysterious and very still, the lawns a soft silver dusted ever so lightly with dew. Not a leaf was stirring, and the pale night stood like a sweet sad ghost looking down on the world with eyes of wisdom and of wonder. Canterton strolled across the grass, and down through the Japanese garden where lilies floated in the still pools that reflected the moonlight. All the shadows were very sharp and black, the cypresses standing like obelisks, the yew hedge of the rosery a wall of obsidian. Canterton wandered up and down the stone paths of the rosery, and knocked his pipe out in order to smell the faint perfumes that lingered in the still air. He had lived so much among flowers that his sense of smell had become extraordinarily sensitive, and he could distinguish many a rose in the dark by means of its perfume. The full moon stared at him over the yew hedge, huge and yellow in a cloudless sky, and Canterton thought of Lynette’s fairies down in the Wilderness tripping round the fairy ring on the dewy grass.