He dressed quickly and dropped from his window onto the grass, which was not more than ten feet or so below him. And now he seemed to be more master of himself, as he passed across a strip of moonlit green and into the dimness of the wood. He was reminded of the night in which the vision of the fairies dancing had come to him. Now it was full summer and then spring had only been on its way; his long-trained sense marked the difference in a thousand little signs. But that had been a night of silver moonshine, as this was. The contact with nature was clear on such quiet, illumined nights as this. Viola! She grew slowly upon him as he trod the soft grass or the dry crackling beech-mast. Her face, somewhat to his surprise, he could not call up before him, though he tried to see it with his inward eye. But he dwelt upon the slight supple figure that had moved beside him so freely and so gracefully. It gave him pleasure to recall her slender hand, which had lain in his, and he remembered her feet and ankles in their neat brown shoes and stockings, and the fall of her skirt over them, and the little hat of soft white straw with its twisted ribbon. Again he was a little puzzled at the effect these memories had upon him. He had an eye for beauty of animate form. He loved the grace of certain animals; he and Wilbraham together had taken delight in pictures of Greek statuary and vase painting, with special reference to that beauty; he had admired the quick, clean limbs of the two children with whom he had been so much, and of other children of the village, older or younger. But it had been purely an æsthetic pleasure, and had brought with it none of the emotion with which the thought of Viola moved him. He was a little frightened of this emotion and inclined to resist it; but something out of the soft night whispered to him that its current was one with all the emotions upon which he had fed, and grown in feeding. It was part of the secret which he had only half divined at the end of that vigil which seemed to have marked a stage in his life. His joy in the thought of her increased. He recalled the tones of her voice, and the ring of her happy laughter, and dwelt upon things that she had said. They were nothing; they might have been said by anybody; none of them at which he smiled to himself were so worth remembering as the things that little Jane often said and he had remembered afterwards, smiling at them too, but not with that tenderness of feeling towards them.