"

"Oh, Lord!" said Hirst, "do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington and Miss
Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and quacking,
'How jolly!'"

"We'll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd--every one we can lay
hands on," went on Hewet. "What's the name of the little old grasshopper
with the eyeglasses? Pepper?--Pepper shall lead us."

"Thank God, you'll never get the donkeys," said Hirst.

"I must make a note of that," said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to
the floor. "Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a
white ass; provisions equally distributed--or shall we hire a mule? The
matrons--there's Mrs. Paley, by Jove!--share a carriage."

"That's where you'll go wrong," said Hirst. "Putting virgins among
matrons."

"How long should you think that an expedition like that would take,
Hirst?" asked Hewet.

"From twelve to sixteen hours I would say," said Hirst. "The time
usually occupied by a first confinement."

"It will need considerable organisation," said Hewet. He was now padding
softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books on the table. They
lay heaped one upon another.

"We shall want some poets too," he remarked. "Not Gibbon; no; d'you
happen to have _Modern_ _Love_ or _John_ _Donne_? You see, I contemplate
pauses when people get tired of looking at the view, and then it would
be nice to read something rather difficult aloud."

"Mrs. Paley _will_ enjoy herself," said Hirst.

"Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly," said Hewet. "It's one of the
saddest things I know--the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry. And
yet how appropriate this is:

I speak as one who plumbs
Life's dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.

But--after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.

I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand
that."

"We'll ask her," said Hirst. "Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed, draw
my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight."

Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm,
and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were soon
asleep.

Between the extinction of Hewet's candle and the rising of a dusky
Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel in
the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could almost