The love he had for it was an old love, proving to him conclusively that his past life had been intimately associated, some way, with moonlight falling in open places.  Yet the mood that was wakened in him went even farther.  It was as if the sight of the argent satellite stirred and moved deep-buried instincts innate in him, in no way connected with any experience of his immediate life.  Rather it was as if his love for it were a racial love, reaching back beyond his own life:  something inborn in him.  It was as if he were recalling it, not alone from his own past, but from a racial existence a thousand-thousand years before his own birth.  His memory was strangely stifled, but, oh, he remembered the moon!  Forest had spoken of stimuli!  The mere sight of the blue-white beams was the best possible stimulus to call him to himself.

Ezra Melville and he walked under it, talking little at first, and mostly the old, blue twinkling eyes watched his face.  Seemingly with no other purpose than to escape the bright glare of the street lights they walked northward along the docks, below Queen Anne Hill, passed old Rope Walk, through the suburb of Ballard, finally emerging on the Great Northern Railroad tracks heading toward Vancouver and the Canadian border.  For all that Ben’s long legs had set a fast pace Melville kept cheerfully beside him throughout the long walk, seemingly without trace of fatigue.

They paused at last at a crossing, and Ben faced the open fields.  Evidently, before crime had claimed him, he had been deeply sensitive to nature’s beauty.  Ezra saw him straighten, his dark, vivid face rise; his quiet talk died on his lips.  Evidently the peaceful scene before him went home to him very straight.  He was very near thralldom from some quality of beauty that dwelt here, some strange, deep appeal that the moonlit realm made to his heart.

For the moment Ben had forgotten the old, tried companion at his side.  Vague memories stirred him, trying to convey him an urgent message.  He could all but hear:  the sight of the meadows, ensilvered under the moon, were making many things plain to him which before were shadowed and vague.  The steel rails gleamed like platinum, the tree tops seemed to have white, molten metal poured on them.  It was hard to take his eyes off those moonlit trees.  They got to him, deep inside; thrilling to him, stirring.  Perhaps in his Lost Land the moon shone on the trees this same way.

There were no prison walls around him to-night.  The high buildings behind him, pressing one upon another, had gone to sustain the feeling of imprisonment, but it had quite left him now.  There were no cold, watchful lights,—­only the moon and the stars and an occasional mellow gleam from the window of a home.  There was scarcely any sound at all; not even a stir—­as of prisoners tossing and uneasy in their cells.  His whole body felt rested.

The air was marvelously sweet.  Clover was likely in blossom in nearby fields.  He breathed deep, an unknown delight stealing over him.  He stole on farther, into the mystery of the night—­ravished, tingling and almost breathless from an inner and inexplicable excitement.  Melville walked quietly beside him.