The first hint of autumn was in the air that evening.  The bracken had begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm ruddiness.  As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze.  It flashed past over a low wall, and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old mine-shaft.  Ishmael felt a moment’s gladness for its escape; then he went on, and, soon leaving the road, he struck out over the moor.

On he went till he came to a disused china-clay pit, showing pale flanks in the curve of the moor.  A ruined shaft stood at the head, the last of the sunset glowing through its empty window-sockets; an owl called tremulously, the sheep answered their lambs from the dim moor.  A round pearl-pale moon swung in the east, level with the westering sun; as he sank she rose, till the twilight suddenly wrapped the air in a soft blue that was half a shadow, half a lighting.  The last of the warm glow had gone; only the acres of feathery bents still held a pinkish warmth in their bleached masses.

Ishmael sat upon the dry grass, where the tiny yellow stars of the creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay almost too idle for thought.

He wondered both why he did not feel more, and why he was feeling so much.  If Killigrew had died when they were both young, Ishmael would have felt a more passionate grief—­an emptiness, a resentment that never again would he see and talk with him; but part of himself would not have died too.  As he lay, there suddenly came into his mind the first two occasions on which he had heard of deaths that affected him at all intimately—­the deaths of Polkinghorne and of Hilaria.  Of both he had heard from Killigrew, he remembered.  Polkinghorne—­that news could not have been said actually to have grieved either of them, but it had been the first time in Ishmael’s life that even the thought of death as a possible happening had occurred to him.  Hilaria—­a sense of outrage had been added to that; it was not her death that taught him anything beyond the mere commonplace that death can be a boon, but the news of her illness, that illness which unseen had been upon her even in the days when they had tramped the moors together and she had read to an enthralled ring of boys the breathless instalments of “The Woman in White.”  It had been the first time he had recognised that fear and horror lie in wait along the path of life, that not naturally can we ever leave it, that sooner or later illness or accident must inevitably make an end.  Even with his passionate distaste for the mere idea of death, this recognition would not have hit him so hard, if it had not been that the fact of Hilaria’s youth,