"Oh, thanks!" Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly's friendly repentant nose. He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed. Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: "Good fortune, wherever you go." "And to you," said Ben--involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home--across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands. * * * * * In the nights that followed Ben's return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before--usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben's return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf. Shawn--that devil Shawn. To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman's death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could damn himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to nobody else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr. Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man's nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives. And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for--what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?