... As in the cheer and stir within the house where that night were gathered his townsfolk, his neighbours, his "hands." He had thought that their way of meeting him, if he chose to go among them, would matter nothing. Abruptly now he saw that it would matter more than he could bear. They were in there at Mary's, the rooms full of little families, getting along as best they could, taking pride in their children, looking ahead, looking ahead--_and they would not know that he understood_. He could not have defined offhand what it was that he understood. But it had, it seemed, something to do with Letty's account book and Bruce's baby.... Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall and went into the street. He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the "hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house--and to something else.... "What else?" he asked himself. Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean something else.... "What else?" he asked himself. The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be compassionately asking. "What else?" Ebenezer asked himself. He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house. * * * * * Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.