Hamil passed on to the left through crowded gardens, pressing his way
slowly where all around him lantern-lit faces appeared from the dusk and
vanished again into it; where the rustle of summer gowns sweeping the
shaven lawns of Bermuda grass sounded like a breeze in the leaves.

Sometimes out of the dusk all tremulous with tinted light the rainbow
ray of a jewel flashed in his eyes--or sometimes he caught the glint of
eyes above the jewel--a passing view of a fair face, a moment's
encountering glance, and, maybe, a smile just as the shadows falling
turned the garden's brightness to a mystery peopled with phantoms.

Out along the shell road he sauntered, Whitehall rising from tropic
gardens on his right, on his left endless gardens again, and white
villas stretching away into the starlight; on, under the leaning
coco-palms along quays and low walls of coquina where the lagoon lay
under the silvery southern planets.

After a little he discovered that he had left the bulk of the throng
behind, though in front of him and behind, the road was still dotted
with white-clad groups strolling or resting on the sea-wall.

Far out on the lake the elfin pageant continued, but now he could
scarcely hear the music; the far cries and the hiss of the rockets came
softly as the whizzing of velvet-winged moths around orange blossoms.

The January night was magnificent; he could scarcely comprehend that
this languid world of sea and palm, of heavy odour and slow breezes, was
his own land still. Under the spell the Occident vanished; it was the
Orient--all this dreamy mirage, these dim white walls, this
spice-haunted dusk, the water inlaid with stars, the fairy foliage, the
dew drumming in the stillness like the sound of goblin tattooing.

Never before had he seen this enchanted Southern land which had always
been as much a part of his mother-land as Northern hill and Western
plain--as much his as the roaring dissonance of Broadway, or the icy
silence of the tundras, or the vast tranquil seas of corn rippling mile
on mile under the harvest moon of Illinois.

He halted, unquiet in the strangeness of it all, restless under its
exotic beauty, conscious of the languor stealing over him--the
premonition of a physical relaxation that he had never before
known--that he instinctively mistrusted.

People in groups passed and repassed along the lagoon wall where,
already curiously tired, he had halted beside an old bronze cannon--some
ancie