anted that there could be no difficulty about
disposing of that. Before the end, Morgan got the sensation of having
the food rammed down his throat with a pole.

They tried to flirt with him, too, but here again he unconsciously
annoyed them by his unresponsiveness. In fact, being entirely
unacquainted with the game as they were in the habit of playing it, he
set down the strange attempts of Cleo's sisters to provoke him to
banter as rather silly. He did not know that they had thrown off their
first unquestioning acceptance of his impressiveness and were now
subjecting him to sharp criticism. They had their own notion--and a
very definite one it was--of what a perfect gentleman should be, and
they were not disposed lightly to accept a substitute. What, however,
struck him particularly was their unbounded affection for their father
and mother, for Cleo and Mark, and last, though not least, for each
other.

During the evening Mary grew so bold as to offer to show him the
harbour by night, and he welcomed the suggestion as likely to afford
him a little quiet distraction. He had sat amid the family for several
hours, and it had not occurred to anybody he might like to be just
alone. The day had seemed interminable, and as they had been behaving
more freely among themselves, once the restraint had worn off, he had
begun to get a somewhat revised perception of them. Their peculiar
atmosphere was beginning to enter into his being, and his vision of
them, therefore, to lose its first impersonality.

Though the sky was clear, there was no moon that evening, which
elicited the remark from Mary that it was a pity. Morgan presumed that
moonlight made the harbour look much more poetic, whereupon Mary
admitted that she wasn't thinking of the harbour, but of the fact that
it made walking with a girl much more poetic. She wanted him to say
that walking with her was so heavenly, absence of moonlight
notwithstanding, that he couldn't possibly imagine any improvement.
But he didn't say it. He only just gave the faintest indication of a
laugh.

When he happened to admire the far-stretching, soft shadow of the sea,
with its gentle, irregular line of white where it met the shore, she
asked him if he wouldn't like to be rowing just then with a girl on a
lovely lake. She wanted him to say--yes, if the girl were she. But he
did not say it, and he had no idea that she was getting angry.

They walked on a little in silence, passing a girl t