Tilly after the others left, looked slightly embarrassed, and,
saying that she, too, would help serve the supper, she moved away. This
threw John and Tilly together again. Some couples had seated themselves
in chairs against the wall, and, as there were vacancies, they sat down
also. The negroes, to the accompaniment of guitars, began singing old
plantation melodies. The moon, higher in the heavens now, shed a
glorious sheen over the still landscape. John was too full of adoration
and joy to utter a word. Tilly seemed to sense his mood to its depths
and to blend a mood of like nature with it.

"I love you--I love you!" John's soul seemed to whisper, but his tongue
remained an inactive lump in his mouth.

"I know--I understand," Tilly's soul seemed to be saying in the same
inaudible way. He smelled the perfume of the geranium leaves on his
coat, and his big red fingers raised them to his nostrils. He told
himself that it was a silly, womanish act, but what did he care? Tilly's
fingers had pinned them there, the little fingers he longed to caress.

Joel served her first. He came past other girls and brought Tilly a
plate containing cake and a glass of sillibub and hastened away after
she had sweetly thanked him.

Tilly held the plate in her lap, idly toying with the spoon.

"Why don't you eat it?" John asked.

"Because the others haven't theirs yet," she answered.

"Oh, I see," he muttered, chagrined in spite of his happiness. "I'll
never get on to your ways. I've been brought up different. I've worked
hard since I was a boy--I-- I--" But he could not go farther. Why should
he allude to his sordid home life when it was a thing which he now so
utterly despised? How could he speak of his mother, who was so widely
and strangely different from the women Tilly knew? No, he would let
those things rest.

Various young men had served all the ladies on the veranda when Joel
came out with a plate and looked about as if trying to find some lady
who had been overlooked. Finding no one, he brought it to John.

"You take it, Mr. Trott," he said, suavely, and yet with a touch of
irrepressible dejection in his tone.

John stared in stupid bewilderment and then jerked out, "Keep it
yourself." It was just such a well-meant reply as he might have made to
one of his workmen who was offering him a cigar, and yet it quite
frustrated Joel, who stood awkwardly waiting, the plate still timidly
extended.

"Oh no! I'm going right back,