Dickie was curious.  He shared Millings’s interest in the “young lady from Noo York.”  Shyness fought with a sense of adventure, until to-night, a night fully ten nights after Sheila’s arrival, the courage he imbibed at the bar of The Aura gave him the necessary impetus.  He pulled himself up from his elbow, removed his foot from the rail, straightened his spotted tie, and pushed through the swinging doors out into the night.

It was a moonlit night, as still and pure as an angel of annunciation—­a night that carried tall, silver lilies in its hands.  Above the small, sleepy town were lifted the circling rim of mountains and the web of blazing stars.  Sylvester’s son, after a few crunching steps along the icy pavement, stopped with his hand against the wall, and stood, not quite steadily, his face lifted.  The whiteness sank through his tainted body and brain to the undefiled child-soul.  The stars blazed awfully for Dickie, and the mountains were awfully white and high, and the air shattered against his spirit like a crystal sword.  He stood for an instant as though on a single point of solid earth and looked giddily beyond earthly barriers.

His lips began to move.  He was trying to put that mystery, that emotion, into words ...  “It’s white,” he murmured, “and sharp—­burning—­like—­like”—­his fancy fumbled—­“like the inside of a cold flame.”  He shook his head.  That did not describe the marvelous quality of the night.  And yet—­if the world had gone up to heaven in a single, streaming point of icy fire and a fellow stood in it, frozen, swept up out of a fellow’s body....  Again he shook his head and his eyes were possessed by the wistful, apologetic smile.  He wished he were not tormented by this queer need of describing his sensations.  He remembered very vividly one of the many occasions when it had roused his father’s anger.  Dickie, standing with his hand against the cold bricks of The Aura, smiled with his lips, not happily, but with a certain amusement, thinking of how Sylvester’s hand had cracked against his cheek and sent all his thoughts flying like broken china.  He had been apologizing for his slowness over an errand—­something about leaves, it had been—­the leaves of those aspens in the yard—­he had told his father that they had been little green flames—­he had stopped to look at them.

“You damn fool!” Sylvester had said as he struck.

“You damn fool!” Once, when a stranger asked five-year-old Dickie his name, he had answered innocently “Dickie-damn-fool!”

“They’ll probably put it on my tombstone,” Dickie concluded, and, stung by the cold, he shrank into his coat and stumbled round the corner of the street.  The reek of spirits trailed behind him through the purity like a soiled rag.