and up the gravel path to the henhouse.  Lifting the rusty latch, he stepped quietly into the dusky, feathery shelter.  “I can think the damned business out, here,” he thought.  There was a scuffling “cluck” on the roosts, but when he sat down on an overturned box, the fowls settled into stillness and, except for an occasional sleepy squawk, the place was quiet.  He drew a long breath, and dropped his chin on his fist.  “Now I’ll think,” he said.  Then, through the cobwebby windows, he saw in the yellowing west the new moon, and below it the line of distant hills.  An old pine tree stretched a shaggy branch across the window, and he said to himself that the moon and the hills and the branch were like a Japanese print.

He took the letter out of his pocket—­his very fingers shrinking as he touched it—­and straining his eyes in the gathering dusk, he read it all through.  Then he looked at the moon, which was sliding—­sliding behind the pine.  Yes, that ragged branch was very Japanese.  If he hadn’t gone out on the river that night with Edith, he would never have met Lily.  The thing he had said on his wedding day, in the meadow, about “switches,” flashed into his mind:  “A little thing can throw the switches.”

“Ten minutes in a rowboat,” he said,—­“and this!” One of the hens clucked.  “I’ll fight,” he said.  “Lots of men come up against this sort of thing, and they hand the whole rotten business over to a lawyer.  I’ll fight.  Or I’ll move....  Perhaps that’s the best way?  I’ll just tell Eleanor we’ve got to live in New York.  Damn it! she’d ask why?  I’ll say I have a job there.  Lily’d never be able to find me in New York.”  The moon slipped out below the pine, and hung for a dim moment in the haze.  Maurice’s mind went through a long and involved plan of concealing his address from Lily when he moved to New York....  “But what would we live on while I was finding a job?” ...  Suddenly thought stopped short; he just watched the moon, and listened to a muffled stir among the hens.  Then he took out his knife, and began to cut little notches on the window sill.  “I’ll fight,” he said, mechanically.

There were running steps on the gravel path, and instantly he was on his feet.  He had the presence of mind to put his hand into a nest, so that when Edith came in she reproached him for getting ahead of her in collecting eggs.

“How many have you got?  Two?  Griselda was on the nest when I started up the mountain, but I thought there was another egg there?”

“Only one,” he said, thickly, and handed it to her.

“Come on in the house,” Edith commanded; “I suppose,” she said, resignedly, “Eleanor is playing on the piano!” (Edith, as her adoration of Eleanor lessened, was frankly bored by her music.)

“All right,” Maurice said, and followed her.

Edith asked no questions; Maurice’s “word” on the road had sobered her too much for talk.  “He’s mad about something,” she thought; “but I never heard Maurice say—­that!” She didn’t quite like to repeat what he had said, though Johnny had confessed to saying “part of it.”  “I don’t believe he ever did,” Edith thought; “he’s putting on airs!  But for Maurice to say all of it!—­that was wrong,” said Edith, gravely.