Falbe subaqueously.

"Then you were afraid even where no fear was, mother darling," said he,
"and if you would like to sit out in the garden I'll take a chair out
for you, and a table and candles. Let's all sit out; it's a divine hour,
this hour after sunset. There are but a score of days in the whole year
when the hour after sunset is warm like this. It's such a pity to
waste one indoors. The young people"--and he pointed to Sylvia and
Michael--"will gaze into each other's hearts, and Mamma's will beat in
unison with Lady Ursula's, and I will sit and look at the sky and become
profoundly sentimental, like a good German."

Hermann and Michael bestirred themselves, and presently the whole little
party had encamped on chairs placed in an oasis of rugs (this was done
at the special request of Mrs. Falbe, since Lady Ursula had caught a
chill that developed into consumption) in the small, high-walled garden.
Beyond at the bottom lay the road along the embankment and the grey-blue
Thames, and the dim woods of Battersea Park across the river. When they
came out, sparrows were still chirping in the ivy on the studio wall
and in the tall angle-leaved planes at the bottom of the little plot,
discussing, no doubt, the domestic arrangements for their comfort
during the night. But presently a sudden hush fell upon them, and their
shrillness was sharp no more against the drowsy hum of the city. The
sky overhead was of veiled blue, growing gradually more toneless as the
light faded, and was unflecked by any cloud, except where, high in the
zenith, a fleece of rosy vapour still caught the light of the sunken
sun, and flamed with the soft radiance of some snow-summit. Near it
there burned a molten planet, growing momentarily brighter as the night
gathered and presently beginning to be dimmed again as a tawny moon
three days past the full rose in the east above the low river horizon.
Occasionally a steamer hooted from the Thames and the noise of churned
waters sounded, or the crunch of a motor's wheels, or the tapping of
the heels of a foot passenger on the pavement below the garden wall. But
such evidence of outside seemed but to accentuate the perfect peace of
this secluded little garden where the four sat: the hour and the place
were cut off from all turmoil and activities: for a moment the stream
of all their lives had flowed into a backwater, where it rested immobile
before the travel that was yet to come. So it seemed to Michael th