Denise and Marpasse set out together, keeping a little distance from the road, and walking under the shadows of the trees. Soon the moon came up, and made the May woods magical, and full of a mystery that was clean and pure. Nightingales sang in the thickets, and the scent of the dew on the grass and dead leaves came with the perfume of wild flowers out of the dusk. Marpasse was in a happy mood despite a day’s tramp, and the adventure with the boar. “I have a feeling in me,” she said, “that Silver John looks at us kindly out of the sky. Throw us a penny, good Lord Moon, or some hair out of your silver beard. Hear how the birds are singing. They shall sing a merry jingle into our pockets.” Denise walked beside Marpasse with a smile of peace and of human nearness stealing upon her heart. And the Moon who looked down on the world must have been as wise as the breadth of his solemn face. “Strange,” he may have thought, “here are a saint and a stroller hand in hand, comforting one another, and making the night mellow!” But they were both women who had suffered as only women suffer, and the wise Moon may have understood life, and sped them on with a glimmer of good luck. Marpasse’s sense of a blessing that was to be, saw its fulfilment as in the magic of an Eastern tale. They had walked a mile or more, and were looking about them for shelter for the night, when Marpasse stood still to listen, with one hand at her ear. “Ssh,” said she, “what’s in the wind?” It was the sound of a bell that she and Denise heard, a faint melancholy ripple like the sound of falling water in the stillness of the night. Sometimes it ceased and then broke out again, coming no nearer, nor dwindling into the distance. “A chapel bell?” Marpasse shook her head. “No, nor a cow bell either. Poor soul, I know the sound of it. That bell has a voice if ever a bell had.” She listened awhile, and then touched Denise’s arm. “It comes from yonder, there, by that black clump of yews. A leper’s bell, or I have never been a sinner.” They went towards the thicket of yews that stood there as though a black cloud covered the face of the moon. The sound of the bell grew more importunate and human. Marpasse whispered to Denise. “It is the death toll,” she said, “I have heard such a sound before at night. The poor souls do not like to die alone in the dark. And those who hear the bell sometimes take pity.” Stretched at the foot of the yew tree with the black plumes curving overhead, Marpasse and Denise found an old man whose face was as white as the cloak he wore. A hand was rocking to and fro ringing the leper bell, whose melancholy sound seemed to die away with the moonlight into the midnight of the yews. Marpasse bent over him, she had seen too much of the rougher aspects of life to be greatly afraid of a leper. “Hallo, father,” she said, “here is company for you, you can stop your ringing.”