'The night was at her noon'-- is a capital ending for the first hexameter--and the moon is booked for the next stage.

Come in." "No, I shall stay out." "Don't be nonsensical." "By moonlight there is no nonsense like common sense." "What! we--who have climbed the Pyramids, and sailed up the Nile, and seen magic at Cairo, and been nearly murdered, bagged, and Bosphorized at Constantinople, is it for us, who have gone through so many adventures, looked on so many scenes, and crowded into four years events that would have satisfied the appetite of a cormorant in romance, if it had lived to the age of a phoenix;--is it for us to be doing the pretty and sighing to the moon, like a black-haired apprentice without a neckcloth on board of the Margate hoy?
Nonsense, I say--we have lived too much not to have lived away our green sickness of sentiment." "Perhaps you are right, Ferrers," said Maltravers, smiling.

"But I can still enjoy a beautiful night." "Oh, if you like flies in your soup, as the man said to his guest, when he carefully replaced those entomological blackamoors in the tureen, after helping himself--if you like flies in your soup, well and good--_buona notte_." Ferrers certainly was right in his theory, that when we have known real adventures we grow less morbidly sentimental.

Life is a sleep in which we dream most at the commencement and the close--the middle part absorbs us too much for dreams.

But still, as Maltravers said, we can enjoy a fine night, especially on the shores of Naples.
Maltravers paced musingly to and fro for some time.