The boy gazed after her a moment, wondering if he should follow her, but while he waited she was gone, and he heard her lock the door after her. Then he limped down the road in a kind of swoon of joy. Sometimes he tried to whistle--he tried a bar of Schubert's "Serenade," but consciously stopped. Again and again under his breath as loud as he dared, he called the name "Ellen" and stood gazing at the moon, and then tried to hippety-hop, but his limp stopped that. Then he tried whistling the "Miserere," but he pitched it too high, and it ran out, so he sang as he turned across the commons toward home, and that helped a little; and he opened the door of his home singing, "How can I leave thee--how can I bear to part?" The light was burning in the kitchen, and he went to his mother and kissed her. His face was aglow, and she saw what had happened to him. She put him aside with, "Run on to bed now, sonny; I've got a little work out here." And he left her. In the sitting room only the moon gave light. He stood at the window a moment, and then turned to his melodeon. His hands fell on the major chord of "G," and without knowing what he was playing he began "Largo." He played his soul into his music, and looking up, whispered the name "Ellen" rapturously over and over, and then as the music mounted to its climax the whole world's mystery, and his personal thought of the meaning of life revelled through his brain, and he played on, not stopping at the close but wandering into he knew not what mazes of harmony. When his hands dropped, he was playing "The Long and Weary Day," and his mother was standing behind him humming it. When he rose from the bench, she ran her fingers through his hair and spoke the words of the song, "'My lone watch keeping,' John, 'my lone watch keeping.' But I think it has been worth while." Then she left him and he went to bed, with the moon in his room, and the murmur of waters lulling him to sleep. But he looked out into the sky a long time before his dream came, and then it slipped in gently through the door of a nameless hope. For he wished to meet her in the moon that night, but when they did meet, the white veil of the falling waters of the dam blew across her face and he could not brush it away. For one is bold in dreams. A little after sunrise the next morning John rode away from his mother's door, on one of his horses, leading the other one. He was going up the hill to get Bob Hendricks, and the two were to ride to Lawrence. He had been promised work, carrying newspapers, and the Yankee in him made him believe he could find work for the other horse. As the boy turned into Main Street waving his mother good-by, he saw the places where he and Ellen Culpepper had stopped the night before, and they looked different some way, and he could not realize that he was in the same street.