regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht.
Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this
background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to
look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over
there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll
hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht--was it for this that he
had begged the assistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative
abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed
of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had
called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of
note-paper on a hearth.
Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. "There was another
Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning," he vouchsafed.
"Politics?"
"Said the reform movement was a joke."
"Good one?"
"Good movement, you mean?"
"No--good joke."
"No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circumstances
whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would
appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature."
"I see."
"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Peter, nodding toward the town,
"and look into it a little. If there is time, I may even decide to show
these fellows how a reform proposition ought to be handled to ensure
results."
Far off on the hill a single light twinkled through the trees, very
yellow against the pale moonlight. Varney's eye fell upon it and
absently held it. It was Mary Carstairs's light, though, of course, he
had no means of knowing that.
Presently Peter lolled around and looked at him. "H'm! Sunk in a sodden
slumber, I suppose?"
"Not at all. Interested by your conversation--fascinated. Ha! Here is
something to vary the evening's monotony. A row-boat is drifting
down-stream towards us. Let us make little wagers with each other as to
who'll be in it."
He looked over his shoulder upward at the moon, which a flying scud of
cloud had momentarily veiled. Peter, who had sat down again, glanced up
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