“What’s that?” said her aunt. But Silence was knitting again. “What meant you by that?” asked her aunt, sharply. “I have dropped a stitch,” said Silence. Her aunt spun again, with occasional wary glances. The moon was three-quarters of an hour high. Silence gazed steadily at the gold brooch at Goody Crane’s throat. “The moon is near an hour high; you had best be going,” said the old woman, in a low monotone. Silence arose directly. “Where go you at this time of night?” grumbled her aunt. But Silence glided past her. “You’ll lose your good name as well as your wits,” cried Eunice. But she did not try to stop Silence, for she knew it was useless. “A white sheep’s fleece over his shoulders,” muttered Goody Crane as Silence went out of the door; and the other women marvelled what she meant. Silence Hoit went swiftly and softly down Deerfield street to her old haunt on the north meadow terrace. She pushed in among the wild cherry-trees, which waved, white with the moonlight, like ghostly arms in her face. Then she called, setting her face towards Canada and the north: “David! David! David!” But her voice had a different tone in it, and it broke with her heart-beats. David Walcott came slowly across the meadow below; a white fleece of a sheep thrown over his back caught the moonlight. He came on, and on, and on; then he went up the terrace to Silence. Her face, white like a white flower in the moonlight, shone out suddenly close before him. He waited a second, then he spoke. “Silence!” he said. Then Silence gave a great cry, and threw her arms around his neck, and pressed softly and wildly against him with her wet cheek to his. “Know you who ’tis, sweetheart?” “Oh, David, David!” The trees arched like arbors with the weight of the wild grapes, which made the air sweet; the night insects called from the bushes; Deerfield village and the whole valley lay in the moonlight like a landscape of silver. The lovers stood in each other’s arms, motionless, and seemingly fixed as the New England flora around them, as if they too might reappear hundreds of spring-times hence, with their loves as fairly in blossom. THE BUCKLEY LADY The dark slate stones that now slant to their falls in the old burying-ground, or are fallen already, then stood straight. The old inscriptions, now blurred over by moss and lichen, or worn back into the face of the stone by the wash of the heavy coast rains, were then quite plain. The winged cherubim and death-heads--the terrible religious symbols of the Old Testament, made realistic by New England minds under stress of grief--were quite fresh from the artist’s hands.