As the time approached and the day died, the vision of Timothy grew clearer and more clear. She saw his grief and indignation, his sorrow and dismay; she knew every line in his face which would contract, every furrow that would be deepened, at this event; and she speculated drearily upon his course of action and shivered at the possibility of a meeting between the men. Her distraction did not obscure the drift of John’s last words, or blind her to the importance of keeping tryst at the beech, for he had made it clear that some disaster must overtake them if she delayed her coming beyond the rising of the moon. It wanted twenty minutes to eight when Sarah started to meet the partner of her future life; and as her destination was only a short half-mile distant, she allowed ample time to reach it. Meantime Aggett had passed down the hill five minutes sooner. It was a night of broken clouds. Rapid motion in the direction of the zenith seemed imparted to the stars, as scattered vapour, driven before a light northwesterly breeze, passed across them. With ascending movement, the moon would presently mount a silvery stairway of clouds and pass swimming upward across one scattered tract of darkness to the next. The nocturnal world beneath was full of soft light and sweet spring scent. Nature’s busy fingers moved about those duties men see not in the act. From umbels of infant chestnut leaves she drew the sheaths, loosed the folds of primroses and wood anemones, opened the little olive-coloured buds of the woodbine’s foliage, liberated the chrysoprase spears of the wild arums from the dry earth. A fern owl whirred and wheeled about a blackthorn tree that stood alone near Aggett’s cottage door. Green leaves now clothed it, where a few weeks earlier blossoms had made the tree snow white. The spring green of field and forest and hedgerow looked wan under the increasing light of the eastern horizon; valleyward a mist, born of recent rain, wound sinuously and shimmered opalescent, while above all loomed a background of night-hidden Moor. Viewed at this distance the waste returned no spark or twinkle from the sky, but extended, darkly and gigantically, along the horizon and made the upper chambers of the air shine out the brighter for its own dimensionless obscurity.