He burnt them one by one, shielding the flame with his hand lest it should attract some passer-by, and when the last was burnt he feared no longer anything.  His wonder was why he had hesitated, why his mind had been torn by doubt.  At the back of his mind he had always known he was going.  Had he not written saying he was going, and wasn’t that enough?  And he thought for a moment of what her opinion of him would be if he stayed in Garranard.  In a cowardly moment he hoped that something would happen to save him from the ultimate decision, and now doubt was overcome.

A yellow disc appeared, cutting the flat sky sharply, and he laid his priest’s clothes in the middle of a patch of white sand where they could be easily seen.  Placing the Roman collar upon the top, and, stepping from stone to stone, he stood on the last one as on a pedestal, tall and gray in the moonlight—­buttocks hard as a faun’s, and dimpled like a faun’s when he draws himself up before plunging after a nymph.

When he emerged he was among the reeds, shaking the water from his face and hair.  The night was so warm that it was like swimming in a bath, and when he had swum a quarter of a mile he turned over on his back to see the moon shining.  Then he turned over to see how near he was to the island.  ‘Too near,’ he thought, for he had started before his time.  But he might delay a little on the island, and he walked up the shore, his blood in happy circulation, his flesh and brain a-tingle, a little captivated by the vigour of his muscles, and ready and anxious to plunge into the water on the other side, to tire himself if he could, in the mile and a half of gray lake that lay between him and shore.

There were lights in every cottage window; the villagers would be about the roads for an hour or more, and it would be well to delay on the island, and he chose a high rock to sit upon.  His hand ran the water off his hard thighs, and then off his long, thin arms, and he watched the laggard moon rising slowly in the dusky night, like a duck from the marshes.  Supporting himself with one arm, he let himself down the rock and dabbled his foot in the water, and the splashing of the water reminded him of little Philip Rean, who had been baptized twice that morning notwithstanding his loud protest.  And now one of his baptizers was baptized, and in a few minutes would plunge again into the beneficent flood.

The night was so still and warm that it was happiness to be naked, and he thought he could sit for hours on that rock without feeling cold, watching the red moon rolling up through the trees round Tinnick; and when the moon turned from red to gold he wondered how it was that the mere brightening of the moon could put such joy into a man’s heart.

Derrinrush was the nearest shore, and far away in the wood he heard a fox bark.  ‘On the trail of some rabbit,’ he thought, and again he admired the great gold moon rising heavily through the dusky sky, and the lake formless and spectral beneath it.