The meal was served in the one sitting-room of the house, by the light of a single lamp on the round table and a flood of moonlight that poured in from the sea through the wide-open doors. After the feasts and fatigues of the day, no one had any appetite to speak of for the company dishes that Mrs. Harris hastily compounded, course by course, in the kitchen; but everyone felt that the meal was a pleasant one, notwithstanding. Mr. Yelverton, his host, and Patty, who was unusually sprightly, had the conversation to themselves. Patty talked incessantly. Nelly was amiable and charming, but decidedly sleepy; and Elizabeth, at her lover's side, was not, perhaps, unhappy, but visibly pale and noticeably silent. After dinner they went out upon the verandah, and sat there in a group on the comfortable old chairs and about the floor, and drank coffee, and chatted in subdued tones, and looked at the lovely water shining in the moonlight, and listened to it booming and splashing on the beach below. The two men, by virtue of their respective and yet common qualities, "took to" each other, and, by the time the girls had persuaded them to light the soothing cigarette, Mr. Brion was talking freely of his clever lad in Melbourne, and Mr. Yelverton of the mysterious disappearance of his uncle, as if it were quite a usual thing with them to confide their family affairs to strangers. Eleanor meanwhile swayed herself softly to and fro in a ragged rocking chair, half awake and half asleep; Elizabeth, still irresistibly attracted to the neighbourhood of her beloved, sat in the shadow of his large form, listening and pondering, with her eyes fixed on the veiled horizon, and all her senses on the alert; Patty squatted on the edge of the verandah, leaning against a post and looking up into the sky. She was the leading spirit of the group to-night. It was a long time since she had been so lively and entertaining. "I wonder," she conjectured, in a pause of the conversation, "whether the inhabitants of any of those other worlds are sitting out on their verandahs to-night, and looking at _us_. I suppose we are not so absolutely insignificant but that _some_ of them, our own brother and sister planets, at any rate, can see us if they use their best telescopes--are we, Mr. Yelverton?" "We will hope not," said Mr. Yelverton. "To think that the moon--miserable impostor that she is!--should be able to put them out," continued Patty, still gazing at the palely-shining stars. "The other Sunday we heard a clergyman liken her to something or other which on its appearance quenched the ineffectual fires of the _lesser_ luminaries--" "He said the sun," corrected Elizabeth. "Well, it's all the same. What's the sun? The stars he hides are better suns than he is--not to speak of their being no end to them. It shows how easily we allow ourselves to be taken in by mere superficial appearances." "The sun and moon quench the stars for _us_, Patty."