Out of the midnight arch above him a monstrous sorrowing thing with a stubble of gray beard swooped down. Flame twisted from its side, still it could catch hold of the bubble of glass where Reuben sought to hide himself, catch hold and thrust at it repeatedly with a forked black phallus, while Reuben could not scream to frighten it away. He could not, because now began--he had foreseen it--the one torment he always dreaded most of all: suffocation, a gasping for clean air where none was, lungs locked and heaving, yielding at last because they must and drawing in the sulfur fumes--yet one never died. All were agreed on the definition of eternity.... Meanwhile, on the other side of the palisade of burning logs, Ben and Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury were strolling quietly, talking quietly, watching Reuben with calm. Ben, however, was not faceless like Uncle John, not too remote or impersonal. Ben grinned as he jerked his thumb toward a more distant place, where a little old man with a white beard sat on his hams cutting figures out of paper with a rusty pair of scissors, impaling some of them, tearing some of them, burning some of them with solemn care like an old chapman cooking meat in the open on a forked twig. To whom Reuben advanced through muddy snow and said as he had been instructed: "Forgive us our transparencies." Some one of the words must have been wrong, for the little man rose up gibbering from a toothless gap and came for him viciously, the scissors raised like a hatchet. Reuben was able to scream at last and fling himself away---- Into the warmth where Ben--_Oh, this is waking!_--where Ben was saying: "Hush thee, Ru, hush! Don't be so afeared! I'm here, I'm with thee." * * * * * As Reuben slept on, peacefully after his nightmare, morning imperceptibly arrived, a pallor in an unfamiliar window long dark; much more time must pass, Ben knew, before true dawn. This was that neutral hush before one is compelled to accept a finished thing and say: All that was yesterday. Now and then in the sluggishly advancing, sluggishly dying night, Ben had listened to a drip of melting from the roof. The patient monotone had ceased, Ben never knowing the moment. He crept out naked from under the covers, finding the room not too distressingly cold, and knelt at one of the windows, wishing he might gain a glimpse of the hill road that ran east, toward Roxbury. Shadow-country of black and gray was brightening to the prosaic. An inky monster on Ben's right became a woodshed and a higher structure that must be a stable. A trotting-horse weather-vane grew clear, the horse's head pointing away--so the wind had shifted to blow from the west, and that had probably brought an end to the thaw. Ben fumbled on his clothes and returned to the window. During this brief absence had begun the day's miracle, a promise of fire on the underside of cloud.