From behind came the music of the dance, the shuffle of many feet, laughter, voices; and when the band stopped between numbers, there was loud applause accented by shrill whistles. He was sure the middle-­aged matrons, who normally would have been shocked by such vulgarity in the Yacht Club, tonight thought it was delightful.

He had been there perhaps half an hour when suddenly a voice spoke directly behind the bench.

“Is that you, Johnnie?”

Hauman moved around the edge of the bench and sat down. “I was looking for you. Mrs. Howard said maybe you were out here.”

“Where’s Ethel?”

“Oh, Eth is having a high old time. I just danced with her myself and now some other guy has got her. Lieutenant jg. Personally I wouldn’t wipe my feet on a lieutenant but this guy was good-­looking as all— Say, Eth is a swell dancer. You better watch out!”

In the half-­dark his white uniform was a great blur of white. Grandin saw him reach up and unhook the tight collar.

“Aren’t you going to dance, Johnnie?”

“I may.”

“Look, isn’t this the month for falling stars? Still it wouldn’t be any good tonight, with the fog. But this would be a swell place to see them—all that sky. Or maybe it’s August. You ought to see the stars out in the Pacific,” he went on. “Gee, they’re so close it looks like you could knock them out of the sky with a stick. There’s something they call the Southern Cross. You ought to see it, Johnnie. If you stare at it hard for a while, it seems to shake, like it had been jarred or something. Of course it isn’t really a regular cross but it looks enough like a cross to call it one. My buddy Walt, I must tell you about him sometime, he knew the names of a lot of the big stars and planets, but I never could remember them. Just like in school, I was never any good at languages.”

It was little short of infantile prattle; and why it should also have been charming—oppressively charming and touching—John Grandin couldn’t discover. He was overpoweringly conscious of the white figure glowing beside him in the dark. It disturbed him profoundly to realize again how the presence of Cliff Hauman, who was almost half his age, should make him feel half of Hauman’s, so that he was stirred through and through by a schoolboy worship of the dazzling uniform and the figure in it. It was bizarre, outlandish, out of all precedent with anything that had ever happened in his experience. He was ill equipped to comprehend or control his feeling, unable to determine his dilemma, even to put his finger on it and say it was this, or this.