In raising his own head from the yielding and soft rustling grasses, March became aware of a sound, iterative and teasing, that vexed the languid night. It was like the ticking of a clock, or of an uncommonly strenuous deathwatch. While he listened it seemed to gather force and become rhythmic. “Click! click! clack! click! click! _clack!_ clicketty click! clicketty, clicketty _clack!_ click! click! click! clicketty _clack!_ ting!” Somebody was working a typewriter on this stifling night, presumably by artificial light, in the most aristocratic quarter of Fairhill. Thor knew the incident to be unprecedented. The rhythmic iteration made his master nervous; the sharp warning of the bell at the end of each line pierced his ear like the touch of a fine wire. He sat up and looked about him. An aperture in the foliage let through a single ray of light. It came from the direction of the parsonage. “Tony’s pet hallucination is of a wandering light in the garden and orchard, a sort of ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ affair, which it is his duty to look after,” Hester had said that evening. “He rushes downstairs at all hours of the evening to see who is carrying it. I told him last night that burglars were too clever to care to enter a clergyman’s house, but he cannot be convinced that somebody, bent upon mischief, doesn’t prowl about the premises. He is half blind, you know, and has but three-fourths of his wits within call.” Recollecting this, March arose cautiously, whispered to Thor to “trail,” and stole noiselessly up the easy grade. The light was in the wing of the parsonage and shone from the wide window of the pastor’s study on the first floor. The shutters were open; a wire screen excluded insects, and just within this sat a woman at a typewriter—Hetty! Across the shallow garden he could see that her hair was combed to the crown of her head for coolness, and coiled loosely there. Now that he was nearer to the house, he distinguished another voice, also a woman’s, dictating, or reading, as the flying fingers manipulated the keys. Drawing out his repeater, he struck it. Half-past twelve! “I have been sorely interrupted in my pulpit preparation this week,” Mr. Wayt had informed Mrs. Gilchrist, on taking leave that night. “I fear the sunlight will extinguish my midnight argand burner. ‘The labor we delight in physicks pain,’ and, with me, takes the place of slumber, meat, and drink.”