Edith stood stock-still with amazement; she could not believe her ears. _Maurice_ had said--? As for Maurice, his head bent as if he were walking in a high wind he strode on, leaving her in the road staring after him. "Johnny!" said Edith; "did you hear?" "That's nothing," Johnny said; "I say it often, when mother ain't round. At least I say the first part." "Oh, _Johnny_!" Edith said, dismayed. To Maurice, rushing on alone, the relief of hating Eleanor was lost in the uprush of that ghastly possibility: "If it _is_ mine?" Something in him struggled to say: "If it _is_, why, then, I must--But it isn't!" Maurice was, for the moment, a horribly scared boy; his instinct was to run to cover at any cost. He forgot Edith, coming home by herself after Johnny should turn in at his own gate; he was conscious only of his need to be alone to think this thing out and decide what he must do. There was no possible privacy in the house. "If I go up to our room," he thought, frantically, "Eleanor'll burst in on me, and then she'll get on to it that there's something the matter!" Suddenly he remembered the chicken coop. "It's late. Edith won't be coming in." So he skulked around behind the house and the stable, and up the gravel path to the henhouse. Lifting the rusty latch, he stepped quietly into the dusky, feathery shelter. "I can think the damned business out, here," he thought. There was a scuffling "cluck" on the roosts, but when he sat down on an overturned box, the fowls settled into stillness and, except for an occasional sleepy squawk, the place was quiet. He drew a long breath, and dropped his chin on his fist. "Now I'll think," he said. Then, through the cobwebby windows, he saw in the yellowing west the new moon, and below it the line of distant hills. An old pine tree stretched a shaggy branch across the window, and he said to himself that the moon and the hills and the branch were like a Japanese print. He took the letter out of his pocket--his very fingers shrinking as he touched it--and straining his eyes in the gathering dusk, he read it all through. Then he looked at the moon, which was sliding--sliding behind the pine. Yes, that ragged branch was very Japanese. If he hadn't gone out on the river that night with Edith, he would never have met Lily. The thing he had said on his wedding day, in the meadow, about "switches," flashed into his mind: "A little thing can throw the switches."