The day died very suddenly now. Passing beneath the willows that hung out of Ma Deutra’s chicken-pen, it was almost night already, cool and struck through with the acrid fetor of the roots; and when he came out beyond, the world’s color had changed perceptibly, its passion chilled by the faint white influence of the moon. Turning into the back street, he paused before a small weathered building with “Henry Lake, Merchandise & Provisions” lettered across the false front. “Shut up a’ready,” he mused, with a hard-won sneer. “Stays home of evenin’s _now_--the old bastard. I’ll wring his dried-up neck--you watch.” He moved on again, smoothing out his coat-folds and tipping the Panama further back and to the side, for he had to pass the house now. The perfectly inexplicable thing was that he should find himself so upset over Mamie Cabral--_Mamie Cabral_--a good-enough girl, but.... He walked along the white pickets of the fence, shoulders squared back, heartrending chin thrust forward in a heroic preoccupation, eyes fastened on the moon where Fergus’s willows chopped it into ragged white fragments. But, somehow, he could not get past the gate; he faltered there, set down the suitcase, and leaned his elbows on the posts. Through all the years of his boyhood he had played around that house of Lake’s; later he had stalked past it going to or from his various vessels. And yet he could not have told any one definitely what it looked like. He retained a dim impression of a grape-vine, that was all. Now he looked at it for the first time with eyes of interest, intense glowering interest. The vine, shooting thick and rough from the ground near the front door and sprawling haphazard over the dimming whiteness of the walls till it came to the semi-restraint of a pergola, touched the man’s ponderous imagination and made him think of a snake, or a kind of guardian dragon. “And them two are in there,” he mumbled to himself. “Into the dark.” He leaned still more heavily on the gate-post, his garments melting into the luminous streak of the fence, his dark, working face invisible against a further hedge, only that monstrous exotic bloom of a hat hanging in the dusk, air-sustained. “Tony! Oh--Oh, Tony Va Di!” The low cry came from the side of the house where a bay window sheltered beneath the vine-strangled pergola. Va Di stood up rigid, leaning slightly backward as if before a blow, his tongue running over his lips. He muttered, “Name of God!” The cry repeated itself, half in appeal, half ecstatic. “Ton’! Ton’!” Opening the gate, careless now of who might see or hear him, he strode along the nasturtium-bordered walk and stood beneath the pergola, staring at the window slightly above the level of his head.