The sunset never arrived. Instead, the evening was overcast, and night came on so subtly that Kimble wondered if he had been sleeping when he saw the moon glimmering behind the clouds. But just as the waitress turned away she cried out carelessly, "Oh, you may as well bring me a chocolate, too."
     While we waited she took out a little, gold powder-box with a mirror in the lid, shook the poor little puff as though she loathed it, and dabbed her lovely nose.
     "Hennie," she said, "take those flowers away." She pointed with her puff to the carnations, and I heard her murmur, "I can't bear flowers on a table." They had evidently been giving her intense pain, for she positively closed her eyes as I moved them away.
     The waitress came back with the chocolate and the tea. She put the big, frothing cups before them and pushed across my clear glass. Hennie buried his nose, emerged, with, for one dreadful moment, a little trembling blob of cream on the tip. But he hastily wiped it off like a little gentleman. I wondered if I should dare draw her attention to her cup. She didn't notice it - didn't see it - until suddenly, quite by chance, she took a sip. I watched anxiously; she faintly shuddered.
     He tried to be scientific and logical. The moon was obviously in the sky above the earth, probably hundreds of miles away. The stars were probably further than that. If Ashton had been right, and heaven was out of reach for the living, then it had to be beyond even the stars.
     Kimble was an avowed atheist since the death of his wife, but he muttered a prayer out of respect for Ashton.