the moon’s unaltered face looked down at them.  Maurice had an overwhelming impulse to drop his weakness into endless, ageless, limitless Power; his glimmer of self-knowledge, into enormous All-Knowledge; his secrecy into Truth.  An impulse to be done with silences.  “God knows; so Eleanor shall know.”  The idea of telling the truth was to Maurice—­slipping and sinking into bottomless lying—­like taking hold upon the great steadinesses of the sky....

People began to talk; Maurice did not hear them.  Miss Ladd made a joke; Miss Moore said something about “light miles”; the old, sad, clever woman said, “The firmament showeth his handiwork,”—­and instantly, as though her words were a signal—­a voice, as silvery as the moon, broke the midnight with a swelling note: 

“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky ...”

A shock of attention ran through the watchers on the roof:  Eleanor, standing with her hands clasped lightly in front of her, her head thrown back, her eyes lifted to the unplumbed deeps, was singing: 

“The moon takes up the wondrous tale
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn—­”

A window was thrown open in a dark garret below, and some one, unseen, listened.  Down in the street, two passers-by paused, and looked up.  No one spoke.  The voice soared on—­and ended: 

“Forever singing as they shine....”

Maurice came to her side and caught her hand.  There was a long sigh from the little group.  For several minutes no one spoke.  Miss Moore wiped her eyes; the baseball fan said, huskily, “My mother used to sing that”; the widow touched Eleanor’s shoulder.  “My—­my husband loved it,” she said, and her voice broke.

The garret window slammed down; the two people in the street vanished in the darkness.  The little party on the roof melted away; they climbed through the scuttle, forgetting to joke, but saying to each other, in lowered voices:  “Would you have believed it?” “How wonderful!” And to Eleanor, rather humbly:  “It was beautiful, Mrs. Curtis!”

In their own room, Maurice took his wife in his arms and kissed her.  “I am going to tell her,” he said to himself, calmly.  The overwhelming grandeur of the heavens had washed him clean of fear, clean even of shame, and left him impassioned with Beauty and Law, which two are Truth.  “I will tell her,” he said.

Eleanor had sung without self-consciousness; but now, when they were back again in their room—­so stifling after those spaces between the worlds!—­self-consciousness flooded in:  “I suppose it was queer?” she said.

“It was perfect,” Maurice said; he was very pale.

“I wanted to do something that they would like, and I thought they might like a hymn?  Some of them said they did.  But if you liked it, that is all I want.”