Before long the tea hour came. Thorny had not returned, and he took the meal alone, watching the sunset out of the window. But by and by he grew restless, and finally, taking his hat and his cane, which had an odd-shaped handle made of two carved snakes at once embracing and wounding one another, he went out and strolled across the bridge toward the Winwoods'. By the time he reached there dusk had closed in, though the horizon afar off was overhung by a faint, stirring light from the rising moon. He remembered Silverthorn's injunction, however, and would not go into the cottage. He passed the lilac-hedge, with its half-pathetic exhalations of delicious odor recalling the past, and was prompted to step through a break in the stone wall and ascend the orchard slope. He stood there a few minutes enjoying the hush of nightfall and exulting in the full tide of happiness and sweet anticipation that streamed silently through his veins. All about him stole up the soft and secret perfumes of the summer's dusk,--perfumes that feel their way through the air like the monitions of early love, going out from one soul to another. Suddenly, a side-door in the house below was opened, and two figures came forth as if borne upon the flood of genial light that poured itself over the greensward. They were Silverthorn and Ida. How graceful they looked, moving together,--the buoyant, beautiful maiden and the slender-shaped young man, who even at a distance impressed one with something ideal in his pose and motion! Vibbard looked at them with a bewildered, shadowy sort of pleasure; but all at once he saw that Silverthorn held Ida's hand in his and had laid his other hand on her shoulder. A frightful tumult of feeling assailed him. The small, carved serpents on his stick seemed suddenly to drive their fangs into his own palm, as he clutched the handle tighter. For an instant he hesitated and hoped. Then the pair, passing along below the broken wall, came within ear-shot, and he heard his old boon comrade saying, in a pleading voice: "But you have never quite promised me, Ida! You have never fully engaged yourself to me." Partly from a feeling of strangulation, partly with a blind impulse to do something violent, Vibbard clutched himself about the throat, tore furiously at his collar till it gave way, and, in a paroxysm little short of madness, he turned and fled--he did not know where nor how--through the darkness.