“I’ll discharge him,” faintly.

“’Scharge yerself,” growled Oth, under his breath.

So the old man went back to his batrachians, and Oth ribbed Pen’s sock in silence:  the old fort stood at last as quiet in the moonlight as if it were thinking over all of its long-ago Indian sieges.

Grey’s step was noiseless, going down the tan-bark path.  She drew long breaths, her lungs being choked with the day’s work, and threw back the hair from her forehead and throat.  There was a latent dewiness in the air that made the clear moonlight as fresh and invigorating as a winter’s morning.  Grey stretched out her arms in it, with a laugh, as a child might.  You would know, to look at her hair, that there was a strong poetic capacity in that girl below her simple Quaker character; as it lay in curly masses where the child had pulled it down, there was no shine, but clear depth of color in it:  her eyes the same; not soggy, black, flashing as women’s are who effuse their experience every day for the benefit of by-standers; this girl’s were pale hazel, clear, meaningless at times, but when her soul did force itself to the light they gave it fit utterance.  Women with hair and eyes like those, with passionate lips and strong muscles like Grey Gurney’s, are children, single-natured all their lives, until some day God’s test comes:  then they live tragedies, unconscious of their deed.

The night was singularly clear, in its quiet:  only a few dreamy trails of gray mist, asleep about the moon:  far off on the crest of the closing hills, she fancied she could see the wind-stir in the trees that made a feathered shadow about the horizon.  She leaned on the stile, looking over the sweep of silent meadows and hills, and slow—­creeping watercourses.  The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and beauty than by day:  going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight, to remember that dawn when God said, “Let there be light.”  The girl comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the house she had left.  Every night she came out there.  She left the clothes and spareribs behind her, and a Something, a Grey Gurney that might have been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to the pure old earth.  She never went down into those mossy hollows, or among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always the clear, primitive colors, or white,—­Grey:  it was the girl’s only bit of self-development.  This night she could see McKinstry’s figure, as he went down the path through the rye-field.  He was stooping, leading Lizzy by the hand, as a nurse might an infant.  Grey thrust the currant-bushes aside eagerly; she could catch a glimpse of the girl’s face in the colorless light.  It always had a livid tinge, but she fancied it was red now with healthy blushes; her eyes were on the ground:  in the house they looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness.  The man’s common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain, Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister.  It was time for the girl’s rest to come; she was sick of herself and of life.  So the tears came to Grey’s eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart she was thankful and glad.