Maradick considered it.
“Oh, I say, do!” said Tony, his hand still on Maradick’s arm, and delighted to find that his proposal was being seriously considered. “After all, it’s only a stroll, and we’ll come back as soon as you wish. We can get coats from the hotel; it might be rather amusing, you know.”
He was feeling better already. It was, of course, absurd that he should go out on a mad game like that at such an hour, but—why not be absurd? He hadn’t done anything ridiculous for fifteen years, nothing at all, so it was high time he began.
“It will be a rag!” said Tony.
They went in to get their coats. Two dark conspirators, they plunged down the little crooked path that was the quickest way to the town. On every side of them pressed the smell of the flowers, stronger and sweeter than in the daylight, and their very vagueness of outline gave them mystery and charm. The high peaks of the trees, outlined against the sky, assumed strange and eerie shapes—the masts of a ship, the high pinnacle of some cathedral, scythes and swords cutting the air; and above them that wonderful night sky of the summer, something that had in its light of the palest saffron promise of an early dawn, a wonderful suggestion of myriad colours seen dimly through the curtain of dark blue.
“By night we lingered on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth, and o’er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn:
“And bats went round in fragrant skies,