Eugenia sat at the piano, Lloyd twanged on the harp, while Joyce tuned her mandolin and Malcolm his banjo.  Rob lolled in an open window, listening, and beating time with both feet.  Mrs. Sherman and Miss Allison were down at the far end of the wide porch, where the moonlight was stealing through the vines and shimmering on the floor.

It was on the porch steps that Keith found Betty looking at her hands again, as they lay spread out on her lap, and studying their lines by moonlight.  He sat down beside her.

“How does your Aunt Allison know?” she asked, without looking up.  “It seems like some sort of witches’ work to me, the way she guessed things about the rest of you; and I suppose it’s just as true what she said about me,—­at least the part about being too sensitive and imaginative is true, I know.  Cousin Hetty says I go about with my head in the clouds half the time.  I would love to think that the other part is true, too.  She said it in such a sweet solemn sort of a way, as if she laid some kind of a spell on my hand that was not to be broken.  ’It will keep its promises to the utmost,’ she said, and I feel that it will have to do it now, just because she said so.”

“That is Aunt Allison’s way,” answered Keith.  “Nobody knows how much she has helped Malcolm and me by giving us these, and expecting us to live up to them.”  He touched a little badge on the lapel of his coat, as he spoke.  It was a tiny flower of white enamel, with a little diamond in the centre, like a drop of dew.

“What is that for?” asked Betty, curiously.  “I have been wondering why you and your brother both wear them.”

“Aunt Allison gave them to us.  She calls us her two little knights, and this is the badge of our knighthood, ’wearing the white flower of a blameless life,’ It began one time when we were out at grandmother’s all winter.  We gave a benefit for a little tramp, who came very near being burned to death in a cabin on the place.  We had tableaux, you know, and Malcolm and I were knights in one of them.”

“Oh, I know,” interrupted Betty, eagerly.  “I’ve seen your picture taken in that costume, and it is lovely.”

“And then Aunt Allison explained all about King Arthur and his Round Table, and gave us the motto:  ’Live pure, speak truth, right the wrong, honour the king, else wherefore born?’”

Betty repeated it softly.  “How lovely!” she exclaimed, in a low tone.  All the instruments were going now in the drawing-room,—­harp, mandolin, piano, and banjo, and the music floated out sweetly on the night air to the earnest little couple on the steps.  And the music, and the moonlight, and Betty’s sympathetic little face, made it easy for Keith to grow confidential just then, and speak of things that usually make boys shy.  He told her of his ambition to live up to his knightly motto, and of some of his boyish efforts to right the wrong in the big world about him, and all that he hoped to do when he was grown, and was free to use the money his grandfather had left him.