A soft clicking patter trailed itself over the polished floor and the bulldog’s nose was thrust between his knees. He bent down and fondled the satiny head to still the sudden surge of loneliness [Pg 225]that had overflowed his heart—an ache for he knew not what. A depression was on him, he knew not why—something that had a keen edge of longing like physical hunger. He set back the loving-cup and went out to the front porch to prowl aimlessly up and down past the great gray-stained Ionic columns. It was not late, but the night was very still. The Virginia creeper waved gently to and fro in a soundless breeze that was little more than a whisper. The sky was heavily sprinkled with stars whose wan clustering was blotted here and there by floating shreds of cloud, like vaporous, filmy leaves stripped by some upper gale from the Tree of Heaven. The lawn lay a mass of mysterious shadow, stirring with faint chirps and rustles and laden with the poignant scent of the garden honeysuckle. He could hear the howl of a lonesome hound, a horse neighed impatiently on a distant meadow, and from far down the Red Road, beyond the gate, came the rude twitter of a banjo and the voice of the strolling darky player: “All Ah wants in dis creation— Pretty yellah gal, en er big plantation!” When the twangling notes died away in the distance they had served only to intensify the stillness. He felt that peculiar detachedness that one senses in thick black dark, as though he and his immediate [Pg 226]surroundings were floating in some soundless, ambient ether. The white bulldog scurried noiselessly back and forth across the clipped grass, now emerging like a canine ghost in the light from the doorway, now suffering total eclipse. Staring into the furry gloom, he seemed, as in those moments of semi-delirium in the forest, to see Shirley’s face advance and retreat as though it lay on the very pulsing heart of the darkness. He stepped down to the graveled drive and followed it to the gate, then, bareheaded, took the Red Road. Along this highway he had rattled in Uncle Jefferson’s crazy hack—with her red rose in his hand. The musky scent of the pressed leaves in the book in his pocket seemed to be all about him.