Glancing up at the patched house, he cut his laughter short. Behind the panes a girl’s face vanished into the gloom. The features he could not have sworn to, but the hair shone indubitably bright. Ashamed to be caught mocking her weir, he set out again briskly; and he had rounded the little promontory before confusion cleared into the surprising knowledge that he was glad of something. These were the neighbors of whom Quinbus would have told; the keg of nails was for that absurd, futile weir; and her hair _was_ of the color of winter oak leaves. Why, again, should he care?--but care he did, even to excitement, with an obscure feeling that his acts, even his thoughts, now had as it were a witness, and that now any day could promise pleasant and unexpected turns. He could not account for this glowing satisfaction,--that some one had become mysteriously involved and identified, in his mind, with the bright, volatile strangeness of autumn. On the doorsteps at home, Tony smoked his pipe. “Ah, the beggar’s written at last,” he grumbled; then unfolding a single sheet, read it calmly, without comment. Miles, who had always vaguely connected this coming letter with “enemies made at sea,” was disappointed to see no more change in Florio’s dark face than in his later behavior. Weeks passed without incident. Miles went daily to the village for mail which was never there, and of which the sailor declared no expectation. He returned down river always by the shore path--“to see how the weir gets along,” he told himself stubbornly. It got along slowly, from bad to worse. Sometimes he saw the magician, far out, ankle-deep in mud, hammering stakes, or weaving brush wattles into his foredoomed structure. Once the blue of a calico dress moved among the white birch pillars. Speech of his new neighbors, however, or nearer view, he did not get. No face lurked behind the window-pane. And at home the fir headland sundered them as effectually as the rim of a hemisphere. One night, at his nine-o’clock visit to the upper light, he paused for a time in the lamp-room, his back to the glare, looking out into the dark. Something--perhaps the silence of the evening, the calm, so great that the other tower’s light pierced the water deeply, like an inverted point of exclamation--induced lonely and melancholy thoughts. As he stood thus, a sound rose through the open trap-door. Something stirred, thinly and dryly, on the stairs below. At first like faintly tearing silk, or scuffing sand-paper, it mounted. Footsteps, thought Miles; yet such footsteps as he had never heard, uncertain, soft, and of a person neither shod nor barefoot. They stopped. A harsh yet guarded call followed. If speech, it was no human tongue. Miles waited, in a profound silence. A voice called in strange sing-song; then nearer, chanting what sounded like a fragment of barbarous melody.