Wint was enough of a boy to take a keen delight in the tragedy of this; he was enough of a boy--or enough of a dramatist, for the two things are in many ways the same--to emphasize his situation, bring out the high lights, vest it in the trappings of drama. He did not think of himself as a hero, for having sacrificed everything for Hetty; he did not think of that phase of the situation at all. He had done that because it was the inevitable consequence of events. It was the only thing he could do. He took no credit to himself for the doing. But he did picture himself as broken or destroyed; and as he walked, more or less aimlessly, it was natural that his thoughts should cast back through the months to those other days when he had fallen low. Thus he remembered the Weaver House, and Mrs. Moody. There seemed to him something appropriate and fitting in the idea of returning to the Weaver House this night. He had risen out of it; he would return to it. It was in such surroundings, now, that he belonged. He turned that way. It was no more than nine o’clock in the evening, or perhaps a little later, when Wint left his home. The day had been fine; the night was clear, and there was a moon. It was pleasant to be abroad on such a night. Wint took a leisurely course that brought him through the last fringes of houses above the railroad yards; and he followed the tag end of a street down the hill to the flats covered with slack and cinders. In the light of day, this was a hideous place, black and begrimed. But the moon could glorify even this. It painted blue shadows everywhere; it laid streaks of silver light along the rails; it touched a pool of water, a puddle here and there, and under the touch the water became quicksilver, alive and beautiful. A switching engine moved down the yard, and when the fire-man twitched open the door to replenish the fires, the glare shone in a pale glow upon his figure and back upon the tender. The long strings of cars, box cars with open doors, or coal cars loaded high, took on a beauty of their own in the night; and the winking switch lamps were like jewels, like rubies and emeralds shining in the moon. He had to climb between two freight cars, on his way across the yard; and Muldoon scurried underneath them. Wint grimed his hands on the cars, and rubbed them together, cleansing them as well as he could, while he went on. He picked his way across the tracks, past the roundhouse where a locomotive slumbered hissingly, and on into the fringes of the locality where the Weaver House awaited him. It is the custom in Hardiston that when the moon is full, be it cloudy or clear, the street lamps are not lighted. Thus the street along which Wint took his way was illuminated only by the moon. On either side, the dingy, squalid houses stood, with a flicker of light from one and another where those who dwelt within were still awake. A little later, he passed a store or two, and turned a corner, and so came to the hotel.