“If I see,” said I, “any signs in the blackness, any stirring in the night, will that not be the dawn?” And as I spoke I knew that I was speaking to help my eyes from having to look. They held back from the night as if my body had shrunk from plunging with them down into a cold black sea. “It might be another house, if all you saw was a light.” “No, mother,” I spoke nervously, eager to answer every word that came lest the silence behind me push my eyes indeed into the blackness. “There is no other house.” “There is one house on the mountain top,” said Mildred. “No house could live upon the mountain side,” said Philip. “Oh, what futile conversation,” mocked my mother. “Really, Doctor Stein, is this all your fault?” “No house could live,” said Philip, “on the mountain side. And no man could hold to it.” “He would fall back ere he had risen a single step.” Doctor Stein soothed my mother: “Do not blame me, Mrs. Mark. And do not blame me, either, if someone asks next how we came here ... high up on the impassable mountain.” Mother smiled and patted his fine hand: as much as to say “No, that foolish you are not, dear Doctor. That foolish none of us is.” And then, as they all smiled at the Doctor’s jest, there came from all the room what I most dreaded: silence. No more words to pull me back: but silence pressing against the base of my brain, as I stood near the window. I breathed at ease, for it was really darkness. I began to exult. I prepared my words as if to fling at them in answer to a hostile challenge. “See--there is no sign of dawn at midnight.” The words were not uttered.... I forgot the cozy room in which I stood. I saw the night. And there was something there by which to see it! The black of the sky was limpid: a well of blackness, a blackness that received my sight passively, and my sight sank in it and was lost. This sky had no cloud, and yet no moon or star. It was a black thing enfolding me. But the slope of the mountain was a harder blackness: dense and wilful the mountain side struck down athwart the mellow blackness of the sky. My eyes went immensely far, until the vast stroke of the mountain faded, became moltenly one with the warm night of the sky that folded all about. Deep down where the mountain melted into space and solid and fluid merged into a blindness, I saw a spot of light. I was silent: and as I held my breath, the spot of light moved up. I spoke: “Something is down there ... and it is bright ... and it is moving up.” But there was no answer in the room. My words seemed naked, almost ashamed: so strange they sounded in the place I held between the room and the night.