checked himself, and presently said in an absent voice:

"No, that's too long to tell."

"There's two hours till bedtime."

Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half
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?"