“You are wrong to worry,” she said, softly.  “Besides, it makes you bad company.  You haven’t spoken to a soul since we came in.  For a punishment come and cut the lemon.”

They went out on to the verandah together, her hand resting on his arm.  There, on a broad shelf, a kettle of water was already boiling over a gas stove.

“What are you thinking of,” she chattered.  “We shall have some more of your ferocious poetry, I suppose.  I notice that about you, Arty.  Whenever you get into your blue fits you always pour out blood and thunder verses.  The bluer you are the more volcanic you get.  When you have it really bad you simply breathe dynamite, barricades, brimstone, everything that is emphatic.  What is it this time?”

He laughed.  “Why won’t you let a man stay blue when he feels like it?”

She did not seem to think an answer necessary, either to his question or her own.  “Have you a match?” she went on.  “Ah!  There is one thing in which a man is superior to woman.  He can generally get a light without running all over the house.  That is so useful of him.  It’s his one good point.  I can’t imagine how any woman can tolerate a man who doesn’t smoke.  I suppose one gets used to it, though.”

He laughed again, turning up the gas-jet he had lighted, which flickered in the puffs of wind that came off the water below.  “I could tell you a good story about that.”

“That is what I like, a good story.  Gas is a nuisance.  I wish we had electric lights.  Sydney only wants two things to be perfect, never to rain and moonlight all the time.  Why I declare!  If there aren’t Hero and Leander!  Well, of all the spooniest, unsociable, selfish people, you two are the worst.  You haven’t even had the kindness to let us know you were in all the time, and you actually see Arty and me toiling away at the coffee without offering to help.  I’ve given you up long ago, Josie, but I did expect better things of you, George.”

While she had been speaking, pouring the boiling water into the coffee-pot meanwhile, Arty cutting lemons into slices, the two lovers discovered by the flickering gaslight got out of a hammock slung across the end of the verandah and came forward.

“You seemed to be getting along so well we didn’t like to disturb you, Mrs. Stratton,” explained George, shaking hands.  He was bronzed and bright-eyed, not handsome but strong and kindly-looking; he had a kindly voice, too; he wore a white flannel boating costume under a dark cloth coat.  Josie, also wore a sailor dress of dark blue with loose white collar and vest; a scarlet wrap covered her short curly hair; her skin was milkwhite and her features small and irregular.  Josie and Connie could never be mistaken for anything but sisters, in spite of the eleven years between them.  Only Josie was pretty and plastic and passionless, and Connie was not pretty nor plastic nor passionless.  They were the contrast one sees so often in children kin-born of the summer and autumn of life.