they slept in an olive garden; till the moon, striking in silver slants
between silver trees, lit on Rodney's face, and he opened dreamy eyes on
a pale, illumined world. At his side Peter, still in the shadows, slept
rolled up in a bag. Rodney slept with a thin plaid shawl over his knees.
He glanced for a moment at Peter's pale face, a little pathetic in sleep,
a little amused too at the corners of the lightly-closed lips. Rodney's
brief regard was rather friendly and affectionate; then he turned from
the dreaming Peter to the dreaming world. They had gone to sleep in a
dark blue night lit by golden stars, and the olive trees had stood dark
and unwhispering about them, gnarled shapes, waiting their
transformation. Now there had emerged a white world, a silver mystery,
a pale dream; and for Rodney the reality that shone always behind the
shadow-foreground dropped the shadows like a veil and emerged in clean
and bare translucence of truth. The dome of many-coloured glass was here
transcended, its stain absorbed in the white radiance of the elucidating
moon. So elucidating was the moon's light that it left no room for
confusion or doubt. So eternally silver were the still ranks of the
olives that one could imagine no transformation there. That was the pale
and immutable light that lit all the worlds. Getting through and behind
the most visible and obvious of the worlds one was in the sphere of true
values; they lay all about, shining in unveiled strangeness, eternally
and unalterably lit. So Rodney, who had his own value-system, saw them.

Peter too was caught presently into the luminous circle, and stirred, and
opened pleased and friendly eyes on the white night--Peter was nearly
always polite, even to those who woke him--then, half apologetically,
made as if to snuggle again into sleep, but Rodney put out a long thin
arm and shoved him, and said, "It's time to get up, you slacker," and
Peter murmured: