For a moment, for more than a long moment, her question hung unanswered in the air. And as, straining forward, poised, vibrant, she watched him, she saw the hard, dry mask he had made for himself through those years grow flabby and white as dough; she saw the eyes widening and the lips going loose with the memory he had never uttered. "Yes," he cried in a loud voice. "You bring me to it, do you?" The man was actually shaking. "Yes, then, I saw Andrew go down that night. I heard him call in the dark. I saw his face on the water. I saw his hand reaching up as the wave brought him by--reaching up to me. I could almost touch it--but not quite. If you knew what the sea was that night, and the wind; how lonely, how dark! God! And here I stand and say it out loud! I couldn't reach his hand--not quite.... I've told you now, Mary, what I swore I'd never tell.... _Damn you_!" With that curse he turned unsteadily on his heel and left her. The shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken, shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching out her arms. "Joshua!" she called to him, "Joshua, Joshua, come back!" In the last faint light from the sky where stars began to come, her face was wet with tears of pity and repentance; pity for the man who had walled himself in with that memory; repentance for the sin of her blindness. "Joshua!" she called again, but he did not seem to hear. It was too much for me. Feeling more shame than I can tell, and with it a new gnawing bitterness of jealousy, I sneaked out of hiding by the "Lillian" stone and down the Dome toward the moors. "Good Grandmother!" I know I grew redder and redder as I walked. "I hope I don't have to see _her_ again--the old thing!" But I did, and that before many minutes had elapsed. For fetching back into the village by the ice-house and the back-side track, I was almost in collision with a hurrying shade in the dark under Dow's willows. It was Mary. I shall not forget the queer moment of suspense as she peered into my face, nor the touch of her fingers on my arm, nor the sigh. "Oh--you're--you're the Means boy." An embarrassment, pathetic only now in memory, came upon her. "I--I wonder----" Her confusion grew more painful and her eyes went everywhere in the dark. "You don't happen to have seen any one--any--you haven't seen Mr. Blake, have you?" "No!" I shook off the hand that still lay, as if forgotten, on my outraged arm. "What you want of _him_? _He's_ no good!" With that shot for parting I turned and stalked away. Behind me after a moment, I heard her cry of protest, dismal beyond words. "Why do you say that, boy? What do you mean by that?"