Opening the door and closing it carefully behind her, she stole noiselessly up the dark staircase, while Will, twitching nervously, paced restlessly up and down the brick floor. A pile of walnuts which Miss Saidie had been shelling for cake lay on the hearth, and, picking up the heavy old hammer she had used, he cracked a nut and ate it hurriedly. Hungry as he was--for he had not been home to supper--he found difficulty in swallowing, and, laying the hammer down upon the bricks, he rose and stood waiting beside the stove. Though the night was warm, a shiver ran suddenly through him, and, stirring the fading embers with a splinter of resinous pine, he held out his shaking hands to the blaze. In a moment Maria entered and handed him the brooch in a little box. "Try to keep up courage, Will," she said, pushing him into the area under the back steps; "and above all things, do not come here again. It is so unsafe." He promised lightly that he would not, and then told her good-by with an affectionate pat upon the arm. "Well, you are a bully good chap, after all," he added, as he stepped out into the night. For a while Maria stood looking after him across the moonlit fields, and then, even as she turned to enter the house, the last troubled hour was blotted from her consciousness, and she lived over again the moment of Christopher's embrace. With that peculiar power to revive and hold within the memory an instant's emotion which is possessed by ardent and imaginative women, she experienced again all the throbbing exhilaration, all the fulness of being, which had seemed to crowd the heartbeats of so many ordinary years into the single minute that was packed with life. That minute was hers now for all time; it was a possession of which no material loss, no untoward fate could defraud her; and as she felt her steps softly up the dark staircase, it seemed to her that she saw her way by the light of the lamp that was burning in her bosom. To her surprise, as she reached the dining-room a candle was thrust out before her, and, illuminated by the trembling flame, she saw the face of Fletcher, hairy, bloated, sinister, with the shadow of evil impulses worked into the mouth and eyes. For a moment he wagged at her in silence, and in the flickering radiance she saw each swollen vein, each gloomy furrow, with exaggerated distinctness. He reminded her vaguely of some hideous gargoyle she had seen hanging from an early Gothic cathedral. "So you've taken to gallivanting, like the rest," he observed with coarse pleasantry. "I'd thought you were a staid and sober-minded woman for your years, but it seems that you are of a bunch with all the others." "I've been out in the moonlight," answered Maria, while a sensation of sickness stole over her. "It is as bright as day, but I thought you were in bed long ago."