She nodded, impatient at his delay, and he slipped into the shadow of the maples and disappeared. For a minute she could hear the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel of the driveway. She sat down on the grass by the roadside, and leaned her head against the big white gate-post. The lantern burned steadily beside her, casting on the ground a shower of yellow spots that blurred into a widening circle of light. Except for the crickets all was still. The cooler air of night brought out the heavy scents of damp earth and leaves, and over in the deep grass a late May-apple spilled from its ivory cup the heavy odor of death. A bob-white fluted in the darkness on the other side of the road. Her acute apprehension had ceased. William King was so certain, that, had the reality been less dreadful she would have been ashamed of the fuss she had made. She wanted only this final assurance that the boy was at home, safe and sound; then she would think of her own affairs. She watched the moths fly about the lantern, and when one poor downy pair of wings touched the hot, domed top and fell fluttering into the road, she bent forward and looked at it, wondering what she could do for it. To kill it would be the kindest thing,--to put it out of its pain. But some obscure connection of ideas made her shudder back from death, even a moth's death; she lifted the little creature gently, and laid it in the dewy grass. Down the Wrights' carriage road she heard a footstep on the gravel; a step that grew louder and louder, the confident, comforting step of the kind friend on whom she relied as she had never relied on any human being. "What did I tell you?" William called to her, as he loomed out of the darkness into the circle of light from the lantern. "He is all right?" she said trembling; "you saw him?" "I didn't see him, but--" "Oh," she said blankly. "I saw those who had, ten minutes before; won't that do?" he teased her. "I found the Wright family just going to bed--where you ought to be this minute. I said I had just stopped in to say how-do-you-do. Samuel at once reproved me, because I hadn't been to evening church." "And he--Sam? Was he--" "He was in the house, up-stairs, his mother said. I asked about him sort of casually, and she said he had just come in and gone up to his room. His father made some uncomplimentary remarks about him. Samuel oughtn't to be so hard on him," William said thoughtfully; "he said he had told Sam that he supposed he might look forward to supporting him for the rest of his life--'as if he were a criminal or an idiot.' Imagine a father saying a thing like that!" William lifted his lantern and turned the wick up. "Now, I'm only hard on him when he is a goose; but his father--_What was that?_"