Anyhow they walked all day and slept on the road.  On the third night they slept in an olive garden; till the moon, striking in silver slants between silver trees, lit on Rodney’s face, and he opened dreamy eyes on a pale, illumined world.  At his side Peter, still in the shadows, slept rolled up in a bag.  Rodney slept with a thin plaid shawl over his knees.  He glanced for a moment at Peter’s pale face, a little pathetic in sleep, a little amused too at the corners of the lightly-closed lips.  Rodney’s brief regard was rather friendly and affectionate; then he turned from the dreaming Peter to the dreaming world.  They had gone to sleep in a dark blue night lit by golden stars, and the olive trees had stood dark and unwhispering about them, gnarled shapes, waiting their transformation.  Now there had emerged a white world, a silver mystery, a pale dream; and for Rodney the reality that shone always behind the shadow-foreground dropped the shadows like a veil and emerged in clean and bare translucence of truth.  The dome of many-coloured glass was here transcended, its stain absorbed in the white radiance of the elucidating moon.  So elucidating was the moon’s light that it left no room for confusion or doubt.  So eternally silver were the still ranks of the olives that one could imagine no transformation there.  That was the pale and immutable light that lit all the worlds.  Getting through and behind the most visible and obvious of the worlds one was in the sphere of true values; they lay all about, shining in unveiled strangeness, eternally and unalterably lit.  So Rodney, who had his own value-system, saw them.

Peter too was caught presently into the luminous circle, and stirred, and opened pleased and friendly eyes on the white night—­Peter was nearly always polite, even to those who woke him—­then, half apologetically, made as if to snuggle again into sleep, but Rodney put out a long thin arm and shoved him, and said, “It’s time to get up, you slacker,” and Peter murmured: 

“Oh, bother, all right, have you made tea?”

“No,” said Rodney.  “You can do without tea this morning.”

Peter sat up and began to fumble in his knapsack.

“I see no morning,” he patiently remarked, as he struck a match and lit a tiny spirit-lamp.  “I see no morning; and whether there is a morning or merely a moon I cannot do without tea.  Or biscuits.”

He found the biscuits, and apparently they had been underneath him all night.

“I thought the ground felt even pricklier than usual,” he commented.  “I do have such dreadfully bad luck, don’t I. Crumbs, Rodney?  They’re quite good, for crumbs.  Better than crusts, anyhow.  I should think even you could eat crumbs without pampering yourself.  And if crumbs then tea, or you’ll choke.  Here you are.”

He poured tea into two collapsible cups and passed one to Rodney, who had been discoursing for some time on his special topic, the art of doing without.