“Go on with your nonsense!” said Tishy.  “And will you tell me how can I hold your hand when it’s round my waist?”

Which was reasonable enough, and may be taken as a sufficient indication of what the moon was already responsible for.

A point of red light moved in the darkness above the seat under the laurels, to which they were repairing, and the scent of a Virginian cigarette was wafted to them.

“Who’s that?” Tishy whispered, pressing nearer to Larry; but she was agreeably certain that it was the gloomy and misanthropic Captain Cloherty, whose place of refuge they had invaded.

Christian, meanwhile, unlike Captain Cloherty, was conscientiously endeavouring to enjoy herself, and was finding that the wheels of the chariot of pleasure drave heavily.  That Barty Mangan was a good dancer was an alleviation, but among those stigmatised by Eliza Hosford as the riff-raff of Cluhir, those now forgotten measures of the first years of this century, the prancing barn-dance, the capering pas-de-quatre, lent themselves to a violence that, even at the uncritical age of eighteen, Christian found overpowering.  “They danced like the Priests of Baal,” she told Judith.  “One expected to see them cut themselves with knives!”

The information that the dog-cart had come for her was of the nature of a release.  Barty put her into it.  The May moon shone on his pale face as he looked up at Christian, and reverently took her hand in farewell.  She had begun to find his dark and humble devotion oppressive; she liked him, which did not prevent her from thanking heaven when he released her hand from a pressure that had lasted longer than he knew.  He stood on the gravel and watched the departing dog-cart vanish, like a ghostly thing, into the elusive mist of moonlight.  The May moon, now sailing full overhead, looked with a broad satisfaction on the hardest hit of her victims.

CHAPTER XIX

At intervals in all histories there comes a pause, in which the moralities proper to the occasion are assembled, expounded and expanded.  Such a moment might now seem to have arrived, its theme being the grain-of-mustard-seed-like character of the Cluhir picnic, as compared with the events that subsequently dwelt in its branches, nesting there, and raising up other events that flew far and wide, farther and wider than they can here be followed.  But since moralities appeal only to the moral (to whom they are superfluous) it seems advisable to proceed at once to the primary result, which was the concert, that sprang like a Phoenix from the ashes of that fire on which the picnic kettle was boiled.