As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on other sides of the fire there were trees.  Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl’s face.  By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body.  The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background.  As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames.  Every muscle of her face was taut.  There was something tragic in her thus staring—­her age between twenty and twenty-five.

A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the conical white hat of a pierrot.  Shaking her head, she still stared.  A whiskered face appeared above her.  They dropped two legs of a table upon the fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves.  All this blazed up and showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul’s floating on the uneven white mist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.

The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when, goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes, as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was like a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out.

“Oh Jacob,” said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, “I’m so frightfully unhappy!”

Shouts of laughter came from the others—­high, low; some before, others after.

The hotel dining-room was brightly lit.  A stag’s head in plaster was at one end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and reddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was.  The diners were linked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to singing “Auld Lang Syne” with their hands crossed a pink and yellow line rose and fell the entire length of the table.  There was an enormous tapping of green wine-glasses.  A young man stood up, and Florinda, taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung it straight at his head.  It crushed to powder.

“I’m so frightfully unhappy!” she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside her.

The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a barrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers reeled out waltz music.

Jacob could not dance.  He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.

“We think,” said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and bowing profoundly before him, “that you are the most beautiful man we have ever seen.”

So they wreathed his head with paper flowers.  Then somebody brought out a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it.  As they passed, people hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-head of a wrecked ship.  Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in his waistcoat.  With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.