But when he and Mrs. Nightingale found themselves alone in the road, enjoying the delicious west wind that meant before the morning to become an equinoctial gale, and blow down chimney-pots and sink ships, he turned to her and went back to what they had been talking of. She could see the fine strong markings of his face in the moonlight, the great jaw and firm lips, the handsome nose damaged by a scar that lay true across the bridge of it, and looked white in the gleam of the moon, the sad large eyelids and the grave eyes that had retaken the look he had shaken off. She could note and measure every change maturity had stamped upon him, and could see behind it the boy that had come to meet her at the station at Umballa twenty years before--had met her full of hope, met her to claim his reward after the long delay through the hideous days of the pestilence, to inaugurate the anticipated hours of happiness he had trembled to dream of. And the worst of the cholera wards that had filled the last months of his life with horror had held nothing for him so bad as the tale she had to tell or conceal. She could see back upon it as they stood there in the moonlight. Do not say she was not a strong woman. "Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale," Fenwick said, "it's always a night of this sort that brings back one's youth? You know what I mean?" "I think I understand what you mean, Mr. Fenwick. You mean if"--she hesitated a moment--"if you _could_ recollect." He nodded a complete yes. "Just that," said he. "I don't know if it's the millions of dry leaves sweeping about, or the moon scudding so quick through the clouds, or the smell of the Atlantic, or the bark coming off the plane-trees, or the wind blowing the roads into smooth dust-drifts and hard clear-ups you could eat your dinner off--I don't know what it is, but something or another on a night of this sort does always seem to bring old times back, when, as you say, they can be got back on any terms." He half-laughed, not in earnest. She found something to say, also not very much in earnest. "Because we remember nights of the sort when we were small, and that brings them back." "Come, I say now, Mrs. Nightingale! As if we couldn't remember all sorts of nights, and nothing comes back about them. It's this particular sort of night does the job." "Did you think you remembered something, Mr. Fenwick?" There was anxiety in her voice, but no need to conceal it. It would as readily pass muster for anxiety that he _should_ have remembered something as that he shouldn't.