The trees blurred on the lawns. The trunks faded until they seemed like the trunks of ghost-trees, haunting that ancient shore. It was no longer possible to distinguish twig from twig where the branches overlapped.
The green grass became a strange, dusky blue; the gray sand of the shore whitened; the blue-green waters turned to ink except for their silver-white caps of foam. Watching closely, our eyes gradually adjusted themselves to the fading light, conveying the impression that the twilight was of unusual length. Perhaps we didn't quite know when the twilight ended and the night began.
The usual twilight sounds reached us with particular vividness from the lagoon and the forest and the shore. We heard the plover, as ever; and deeper voices--doubtless those of passing sea-birds, mingled with theirs. But the sounds came intermittently, sharp and penetrating out of the darkness and the silence, and they always startled us a little. Sometimes the thickets rustled in the gardens--little, hushed noises none of us pretended to hear. A frog croaked, and the hushed little wind creaked the tree-limbs together. Once some wild creature--possibly a wildcat, but more likely a great owl--filled the night with his weird, long-drawn cry. We all turned, and Van Hope, sitting near by, smiled wanly in the gloom.
Darkness had already swept the verandas, and Van Hope's was the only face I could see. The others were already blurred, and even their forms were mere dark blotches of shadow. A vague count showed that there was six of us here--and I was suddenly rather startled by the thought that I didn't know just who they were. The group had changed from time to time throughout the evening, some of the men had gone and others had taken their chairs, and now the darkness concealed their identities. It shouldn't have made any difference, yet I found myself dwelling, with a strange persistency, on the subject.
The reason got down to the simple fact that, in this house of mystery, a man instinctively wanted to keep track of all his fellows. He wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. He found himself worrying when one of them was gone. I suppose it was the instinct of protection--a feeling that a man's absence might any moment result in a shrill scream of fear or death in the darkness. Van Hope sat to my left, a little further to the right was Weldon, the coroner. There were three chairs further to the right, but which of the five remaining guests occupied them I did not know.