But she made as though she did not hear, and called again, always looking past him. And David Walcott, being near spent with fatigue and starvation, wound himself feebly around the trunk of the tree, and the tears dropped over his cheeks as he looked at her; and she called past him, until some women came and led him away and tried to comfort him, telling him how it was with her, and that she would soon know him when he looked more like himself. But the summer wore away and she did not know him, although he constantly followed her beseechingly. His elders even reproved him for paying so little heed to his work in the colony. “It is not meet for a young man to be so weaned from usefulness by grief for a maid,” said they. But David Walcott would at any time leave his reaping-hook in the corn and his axe in the tree, leave aught but his post as sentry, when he heard Silence calling him over the north meadow. He would stand at her elbow and say, in his voice that broke like a woman’s: “Here I am, sweetheart, at thy side. I pray thee turn thy head.” But she would not let her eyes rest upon him for more than a second’s space, turning them ever past him towards Canada, and calling in his very ears with a sad longing that tore his heart: “David! David! David!” It was as if her mind, reaching out always and speeding fast in search of him, had gotten such impetus that she passed the very object of her search and knew it not. Now and then would David Walcott grow desperate, fling his arms around her, and kiss her upon her cold delicate lips and cheeks as if he would make her recognize him by force; but she would free herself from him with a passionless resentment that left him helpless. One day in autumn, when the borders of the Deerfield meadows were a smoky purple with wild asters, and golden-rods flashed out like golden flames in the midst of them, David Walcott had been pleading vainly with Silence as she stood calling on the north terrace. Suddenly he turned and rushed away, and his face was all convulsed like a weeping child’s. As he came out of the thicket he met the old woman Goody Crane, and would fain have hidden his face from her, but she stopped him. “Prithee stop a moment’s space, Master David Walcott,” said she. “What would you?” David cried out in a surly tone, and he dashed the back of his hand across his eyes. “’Tis full moon to-night,” said the old woman, in a whisper. “Come out here to-night when the moon shall be an hour high, and I promise ye she shall know ye.” The young man stared at her. “I tell ye Mistress Silence Hoit shall know ye to-night,” repeated the old woman. Her voice sounded hollow in the depths of her great hood, which she donned early in the fall. Her eyes in the gloom of it gleamed with a small dark brightness. “I’ll have no witch-work tried on her,” said David, roughly.