I brought up by one of the tubbed box-trees and peered in at the Pillar House with a new wonder. I was so used to it there, dead on the outside and living on the inside, that I had never learned to think of it as a strange thing. Perhaps a dozen times I had seen little Hope Gibbs (they still said "Gibbs") playing quietly among the lilacs in the back yard. It was always at dusk when the shadows were long there, and she a shadow among them, so unobtrusive and far away. As for her mother, no one ever saw Sympathy Gibbs. Crouching by the box-tree, I found myself wondering what they were doing in there, Sympathy Gibbs and the little girl; whether they were sleeping, or whether they were sitting in the dark, thinking, or whispering about the husband and father who was neither husband nor father, or whether, in some remote chamber, there might not be a lamp or a candle burning. The dead hush of the place oppressed me. I turned my head to look back at the comfortable, bumbling devotion of Center Church, and this is what I saw there. The door was still open, a blank, bright rectangle giving into the deserted vestry, and it was against this mat of light that I spied Minister Malden's head and shoulders thrust furtively, as he peeped in and seemed to harken to the muffled unison of the prayer. You may imagine me startled enough at that, but what of my emotion when, having peeped and listened and reassured himself for a dozen seconds, Minister Malden turned and came softly down the Court toward the gate and the box-trees and me, a furtive silhouette against the door-light, his face turned back over one shoulder. I couldn't bolt; he was too close for that. The wonder was that he failed to see me, for he stopped within two yards of where I cowered in the shadow and stood for a long time gazing in between the trees at the pillared porch, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and laborious, as though he had been running or fighting. Once I thought he struck out at something with a vicious fist. Then his trouble was gone, between two winks, and he was gone too, up the walk and up the steps, without any to-do about it. I don't know whether he tapped on the door or not. It was open directly. I caught a passing glimpse of Sympathy Gibbs in the black aperture; the door closed on them both, and the Pillar House was dead again. Now this was an odd way for Minister Malden to fast and pray in the Wilderness--odd enough, one would say, to keep me waiting there a while to see what would come of it all. But it didn't. I had had enough of mysteries for one Summer's night, or at any rate I had enough by the time I got my short legs, full tilt, into the shore street. For I had caught a fleeting glimpse, on the way, of a watcher in the shadow behind the _other_ box-tree--Yen Sin, the heathen, with a surprised eyeball slanting at me over one shoulder. * * *