“Don’t leave your bottle half empty,” Keith called after him, imploringly.  “It looks untidy.”

“And so unhappy,” added the bishop.  “Dear me!  This is most singular.  I seem to see two lamps instead of one.  It must have been those apricots.”

Keith interposed: 

“Or perhaps you strained one of your eyes bathing.  It has happened to me, occasionally.  Darkness is the best remedy.  It rests the optic nerve.”

“Shall we take a turn or two outside?” asked Denis.

It was past midnight as the two climbed out of the cave into the night air.  A cool north wind blew across the market-place.  The bishop was filled with a sense—­a clear-cut, all-convincing sense—­of the screamingly funny insignificance of everything.  Then he noticed the moon.

It dangled over the water, waning, sickly, moth-eaten, top-heavy, and altogether out of condition—­as if it had been on duty for weeks on end.  In other respects, too, its appearance was not quite normal.  In fact, it soon took to behaving in the most extraordinary fashion.  Sometimes there were two moons, and sometimes one.  They seemed to merge together—­to glide into each other, and then to separate again.  Mr. Heard was vastly pleased and puzzled by the phenomenon—­so pleased that he gave utterance to one of the longest speeches he had made since his arrival on Nepenthe.  He said: 

“I have seen many funny things here, Denis.  But this is the funniest of all.  The spectacle seems to have been providentially arranged, as a sort of Bonne Bouche, for my last evening on the island.  Dear me.  Now there are two again.  And now they are behind each other once more.  A kind of celestial hide and seek.  Most interesting.  I wish Keith could see it.  Or that dear Count Caloveglia.  He would be sure to say something polite. . . .  The inconstant moon!  I know, at last, what the poet meant by that expression, though the word inconstant strikes me as hardly forcible enough.  The skittish moon, I should be inclined to call it.  The skittish moon.  The frivolous moon.  The giddy moon.  The quite-too-absurd moon. . . .  There it goes again!  Very curious.  What can it be? . . .  Why, this is the reverse of an eclipse, my boy.  The disk is darkened during an eclipse.  It disappears in vacuo.  In the present case it is brightened and rendered, so to speak, doubly apparent.  What would you call the reverse of an eclipse, Denis?  Anti-eclipse?  That sounds rather barbaric to my ears.  One should never mix Greek and Latin, if it can possibly be avoided.  Well?”

“We must have a good look at this thing from your window, and then find out all about it.”

“Oh, but I could not possibly take you from your friends!  I know my way home perfectly well.  You will not dream of accompanying me.”

“Indeed I will.  I walked with you to that house when you first arrived here, and helped you to unpack.  Don’t you remember?  And now you must let me take you there on our last evening. . . .”