On Friday she waited until after the others had gone to bed, and then slipped out. She went into the silent woods as the moths went, purposeless, yet working out destiny. It was a very warm, wet evening, and glow-worms shone incandescently in the long grass, each with her round, wonderful, greenish lamp at its brightest. They beckoned on to faery, though they glowed in perfect stillness. They spoke of marvellous things, though they lit the night in silence. It was a very grave, a very remote personality, surely, that lit those lamps. A more intent eye, a more careful hand were needed, one thinks, to make these than to make the planets, and a mind more vast, big enough to include minuteness. But Hazel felt no awe of them; she was too bounded and earthly a creature to be afraid of mystery. It is the spirit that maketh afraid. She was sure that they were not the Holy Sign, for she had seen them often. The Holy Sign was quite different. 'If I be to go to Hunter's Spinney,' she said, looking up through the black branches and twigs that were like great fowling-nets spread over her--'if I be to go, show me the Holy Sign.' She wandered down the narrow paths. It was very dark and warm and damp. Once the moon came out, and she saw a long pool startle the woods with its brightness, like lightning on steel. The yellow irises that stood about its marges held a pale radiance, and were like butterflies enchanted into immobility. Huge toadstools, vividly tawny as leopards, clumps of ladyfern not yet their full height and thick with curled fronds, stood proudly on their mossy lawns. But none of these was the Sign. 'If it dunna come soon I'll go home-along,' she said. And then, round the next bend, she saw it. At first she thought it was an angel just beginning to appear. The phantom was of a man's height, and it shone as the glow-worms did, only its light would have been enough to read by. It had a strange effect, standing there bathed in its own light in the black unbroken silence. It had a look of life--subdued, but passionate--as a spirit might have when it has just reintegrated its body out of the air. Hazel was terrified. As a rule, she was never afraid in the woods and fields, but only in the haunts of men. But from this, after one paralysed moment, she fled in panic. So she never knew that her second sign was only a rotten tree, shining with the phosphorescence of corruption. Next morning she asked Edward: 'Could folks see angels now?' 'Yes, if it was God's will.' 'If one came, would it be a sign?' 'I suppose so, dear.' 'What'd you do, Ed'ard, if you were bound to find out summat?' Edward was thinking out heads of a discourse on the power of prayer. 'I should pray, dear,' he said absently. 'Who'd answer?' 'God.' 'Would you hear 'Im?' 'No, dear; of course not.' He wanted quiet to finish his sermon, but he tried to be patient. 'You would know by intuition,' he said, 'little signs.'