The beam of the bicycle-lamp moved and fell upon the hands and faces of the young people, and penetrated the recesses of the secret trees.  Several little tongues of flame clipped sensitive and ruddy on the naked air, sending a faint glow over the needle foliage.  They gave a strange, perpendicular aspiration in the night.  Julia waved slowly in her tree dance.  Jim stood apart, with his legs straddled, a motionless figure.

The party round the tree became absorbed and excited as more ruddy tongues of flame pricked upward from the dark tree.  Pale candles became evident, the air was luminous.  The illumination was becoming complete, harmonious.

Josephine suddenly looked round.

“Why-y-y!” came her long note of alarm.

A man in a bowler hat and a black overcoat stood on the edge of the twilight.

“What is it?” cried Julia.

“Homo sapiens!” said Robert, the lieutenant.  “Hand the light, Cyril.”  He played the beam of light full on the intruder; a man in a bowler hat, with a black overcoat buttoned to his throat, a pale, dazed, blinking face.  The hat was tilted at a slightly jaunty angle over the left eye, the man was well-featured.  He did not speak.

“Did you want anything?” asked Robert, from behind the light.

Aaron Sisson blinked, trying to see who addressed him.  To him, they were all illusory.  He did not answer.

“Anything you wanted?” repeated Robert, military, rather peremptory.

Jim suddenly doubled himself up and burst into a loud harsh cackle of laughter.  Whoop! he went, and doubled himself up with laughter.  Whoop!  Whoop! he went, and fell on the ground and writhed with laughter.  He was in that state of intoxication when he could find no release from maddening self-consciousness.  He knew what he was doing, he did it deliberately.  And yet he was also beside himself, in a sort of hysterics.  He could not help himself in exasperated self-consciousness.

The others all began to laugh, unavoidably.  It was a contagion.  They laughed helplessly and foolishly.  Only Robert was anxious.

“I’m afraid he’ll wake the house,” he said, looking at the doubled up figure of Jim writhing on the grass and whooping loudly.

“Or not enough,” put in Cyril Scott.  He twigged Jim’s condition.

“No—­no!” cried Josephine, weak with laughing in spite of herself.  “No—­it’s too long—­I’m like to die laughing—­”

Jim embraced the earth in his convulsions.  Even Robert shook quite weakly with laughter.  His face was red, his eyes full of dancing water.  Yet he managed to articulate.

“I say, you know, you’ll bring the old man down.”  Then he went off again into spasms.

“Hu!  Hu!” whooped Jim, subsiding.  “Hu!”

He rolled over on to his back, and lay silent.  The others also became weakly silent.

“What’s amiss?” said Aaron Sisson, breaking this spell.