A Catapult and a Catastrophe "Oh, sweet pale Margaret, Oh, rare pale Margaret, What lit your eyes with tearful power ?" The dusk had fallen very softly and tenderly over the garden, and the paddocks, and the river.

There was just the faintest wind at the waters edge, but it seemed almost too tired after the hot, long day to breathe and make ripples.

Very slowly the grey, still light deepened, and a white star or two came out and blinked up away in the high, far heavens.

Down behind the gum trees, across the river, there was a still whiter moon; a stretch of water near was beginning to smile up to it.

Meg hoped it would not climb past the tree-tops before eight o'clock, or the long paddocks would be flooded with light and she would be seen.
At tea-time, and during the early part of the evening, she was preoccupied and inclined to be irritable in her anxiety, and she snubbed Bunty two or three times quite unkindly.
He had been hovering about her ever since six o'clock in almost a pitiable way.
It was characteristic of this small boy that when he had been tempted into departing from the paths of truth he was absolutely wretched until he had confessed, and rubbed his little unclean hands into his wet eyes until he was "a sight to dream of, not to tell." Pip said it was because he was a coward, and had not the moral courage to go to sleep with a lie on his soul, for fear he might wake up and see an angel with a fiery sword standing by his bedside.