I lay down on the covers and pulled a comforter about me. As I drifted off I remember wondering how the dark ever kept awake all night. For it was awake. To know that one had only to listen. We all had a signal which we called a “trill,” made by tongue and teeth, with almost the force of a boy and a blade of grass. This, produced furiously beneath my window, was what wakened me. Delia stood between the two houses, engaged with such absorption in manufacturing this sound that she failed to see me at the window. A moment after I had hailed her, Mary Elizabeth appeared at her window, looking distinctly distraught. Seeing us fully dressed, Delia’s indignation increased. “Why didn’t you leave me know you were up?” she demanded shrilly. “It’s a quarter past five. I been out here fifteen minutes.” We were assuring her guiltily that we would be right down when there came an interruption. “_Delia!_” Delia’s father, in a gray bath-robe, stood at an upper window of their house across the street. “What do you mean by waking up the whole neighbourhood?” he inquired, not without reason. “Now I want you to come home.” “We were going walking,” Delia reminded him. “You are coming home at once after this proceeding,” Delia’s father assured her. “No more words please, Delia.” He disappeared from the window. Delia moved reluctantly across the street. As she went, she threw a resentful glance at Mary Elizabeth and me, each. “I’m sorry, Delia!” we called softly in chorus. She made no reply. Mary Elizabeth and I were left staring at each other down our bell-rope, no longer taut, but limp, as we had left it earlier.... Even in that stress, the unearthly sweetness of the morning smote me--the early sun, the early shadows. It all looked so exactly as if it had expected you not to be looking. This is the look of outdoors that, _now_, will most quickly take me back. “It wouldn’t be fair to go walking without Delia,” said Mary Elizabeth, abruptly and positively. “No,” I agreed, with equal decision. Then, “We might as well go back to bed,” I pursued the subject further. “Let’s,” said Mary Elizabeth. XVII THE GREAT BLACK HUSH On that special night, which somehow I remember with tenderness, I sometimes think now--all these years after--that I should like to have been with those solitary, sleepy little figures, trying so hard to get near to mystery. I should think that a Star Story must have come in anybody’s head to tell them. Like this:-- * * * * * Once, when it didn’t matter to anybody whether you were late or early, or quick or slow, not only because there wasn’t anybody and there wasn’t any you, but because it was back in the beginning when there were no lates and earlies and quicks and slows, _then_ things began to happen in the middle of the Great Black Hush which was all there was to everything.