He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his bassoon; but after a few bars of "Annie Laurie" he put the unedifying instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk. It was a starry night of frost. Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in the east. Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon while his parish slept. Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the sky. Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the lame donkey. Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle intensified the stillness. Septimus's own footsteps on the crisp grass rang loud in his ears. Yet both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in harmony with the starlit dimness of the man's mind. His soul was having its adventure while mystery filled the outer air. He walked on, wrapped in the nebulous fantasies which passed with him for thought, heedless, as he always was, of the flight of time. Once he halted by the edge of the pond, and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his pipe until the cold forced him to rise. With an instinctive desire to hear some earthly sound, he picked up a stone and threw it into the water. He shivered at the ghostly splash and moved away, himself an ineffectual ghost wandering aimlessly in the night. The Vicar's lamp had been extinguished long ago. A faint breeze sprang up. The star sank lower in the sky. Suddenly, as he turned back from the road to cross the common for the hundredth time, he became aware that he was not alone. Footsteps rather felt than heard were in front of him. He pressed forward and peered through the darkness, and finally made out a dim form some thirty yards away. Idly he followed and soon recognized the figure as that of a woman hurrying fast. Why a woman should be crossing Nunsmere Common at four o'clock in the morning passed his power of conjecture. She was going neither to nor from the doctor, whose house lay behind the vicarage on the right. All at once her objective became clear to him. He thought of the splash of the stone. She was making straight for the pond. He hastened his pace, came up within a few yards of her and then stopped dead. It was Emmy. He recognized the zibeline toque and coat edged with the same fur which she often wore. She carried something in her hand, he could not tell what.