The sharpest sting of ingratitude is often the sense that the giver has been a fool. Larrabee harbored a surly grudge against himself as he rode silently on, and Luther, uncomprehending his friend's reason for not disclosing his identity, and suspecting that Jack Espey was the man they sought, was silent too. The loud voices of the others in acrimonious criminations and recriminations accented the stillness of the night, and the sound of their horses' hoofs as they filed along the mountain passes, multiplied by rock and ravine, and far echoes from distant heights, might have seemed the march of squadrons of cavalry. The skies had taken on that unfamiliar aspect of the hours which straitly precede the dawn. Far, far, on their pauseless way the constellations fared. Stars were low in the west, which on these summer nights had seemed the familiars of the meridian. A strange sense of loneliness, of silence, pervaded the firmament. The breathless pause that heralds the miracle of dawn bated the pulses of nature. No more song of cicada, no more stir of wind. Once a meteor, with an incongruous irrelevance of effect, shot athwart the sky with its gleaming trail as of star-dust; the motion was like a sacrilege in the holy stillness and breathlessness of the world. And suddenly in the midst of the myriad scintillations a brilliant white jewel was ablaze, which Jasper Larrabee could have sworn was not there before; pellucid, splendid, tremulous, a star of stars. He knew the skies only as the herder or the shepherd knows them in lonely, lowly paths of earth, but even an ignorant man may feel that the circuit below is narrow and the ways above are wide, and the heart is lifted up. Not the name of one of the stellular glories visible to the naked eye could he syllable, but he had marked them all; he was wont to dwell for hours upon their contemplation; he knew the contour of their most brilliant whorls and scintillating arabesques as he knew the intricacies of the woodland ways in the wilderness. He had drawn his horse hastily back upon the haunches, and again his eyes sought the alignment of the stars as his fancy had marshaled them. There was one more,--one that he had never before seen; one unknown to all the splendid nights that had ever shone upon the earth.