The late moon came stealing into the broad, uninclosed passage between the two rooms of his mother’s house, before he had finished his supper. He looked at it from the dusky red glow of the room, but half illumined by the smouldering fire, as he sat at the table, and strove to answer his mother’s chat, and to eat and drink with a normal appetite. The sheen was melancholy and white, and the leaves of the vines that it limned on the floor scarcely stirred. A bird—a wren, perhaps, some tiny, house-loving thing—had built in their midst; a colorless simulacrum of the circular nest, of the delicate shape within, the head and bill distinct, was on the puncheons. But presently she put her head beneath her wing, and then one might hardly have distinguished amidst the tracery of the shadows the nest from a leaf of the gourd vines or from the globular fruit itself. When he strode up the ladder, presently, to the roof-room, he found the moon there, too, in the homely and solitary place. The glittering square of the tiny window lay on the floor; a soft irradiation from it seemed to enrich the narrow, tent-like space. He noted the glimmer on the white bark of a gigantic poplar hard by, and the low hanging branches of the beech. It was very still without: no dog barked, no foot stirred,—only the insistent cry of the cicada, and the sylvan chant of the stream as it hied down the mountain-side, in the lonely splendors of the night. “Seems ef they war laffin’ an’ talkin’ at Strobe’s, I mought hear ’em hyar,” he said. He longed to join them, and yet he doubted. He was in no mood for company. “I be ez mum ez a dumb one,” he said. “I don’t want ter set thar tongue-tied, an’ let them other fellers show off talkin’.” And still he doubted. Mental perturbation wrought upon his resources as toil could not. He sank down in a chair, and bent his head upon his hand, while he cogitated. Suddenly, he saw that the moon had changed in the sky. The trees without caught the light from another quarter. He had slept for hours. He sprang to his numb feet, and bent down to the tiny aperture to look out. The next moment his heart seemed to stand still.