ive with his mother...." But he knew under the
skin that he would be even with that disloyal thought, and would stop
it off at this point in time to believe he hadn't thought it.

Still, for all that this disturbing serpent would creep into his Eden,
for all that he would have given worlds to dare a little more--that
moment in the moonlight, with a glow-flecked water at his feet and
hers, and the musical shingle below, and a sense of Christy Minstrels
singing about Billy Pattison somewhere in the warm night-air above,
and the flash of the great revolving light along the coast answering
the French lights across the great, dark silent sea--that moment was
the record moment of his life till then. It would never do to say so
to Sally, that was all! But it was true for all that. For his life
had been a dull one, and the only comfort he could get out of the
story of it so far was that at least there was no black page in it he
would like to cut out. Sally might read them all, and welcome. Their
relation to _her_ had become the point to consider. You see, at heart
he was a slow-coach, a milksop, nothing of the man of the world about
him. Well, her race had had a dose of the other sort in the last
generation. Had the breed wearied of it? Was that Sally's unconscious
reason for liking him?

"How very young Prosy has got all of a sudden!" was Sally's postscript
to this interview, as she walked back to their own lodgings with her
mother, who had been relieving guard with the selfless one while the
doctor went out to see the phosphorescence.

"He's like a boy out for a holiday," her mother answered. "I had no
idea Dr. Conrad could manage such a colour as that; I thought he was
pallid and studious."

"Poor dear. _We_ should be pallid and studious if it was cases all
day long, and his ma at intervals."

"Do you know, kitten darling, I can't help thinking perhaps we do
that poor woman an injustice...."

"--Can't you?" Thus Sally in a parenthetic voice--

"... and that she really isn't such a very great humbug after all!"

"Why not?"

"Because she would be such a _very_ great humbug, don't you see,
chick?"

"Why shouldn't she? Somebody must, or there'd be no such thing."

"Why should there be any such thing?"

"Because of the word. Somebody must, or there'd be no one to hook it
to.... Have they stopped, I wonder, or are they going to begin again?"
This referred to the Ethiopian banjos afar. "I do declare they're
going to