The little by-path wound around the marsh and then struck up the long wooded hill on the top of which Rosemary lived.  Beyond, through the trees, they could see the moonlight shining across the level summer fields.  But the little path was shadowy and narrow.  Trees crowded over it, and trees are never quite as friendly to human beings after nightfall as they are in daylight.  They wrap themselves away from us.  They whisper and plot furtively.  If they reach out a hand to us it has a hostile, tentative touch.  People walking amid trees after night always draw closer together instinctively and involuntarily, making an alliance, physical and mental, against certain alien powers around them.  Rosemary’s dress brushed against John Meredith as they walked.  Not even an absent-minded minister, who was after all a young man still, though he firmly believed he had outlived romance, could be insensible to the charm of the night and the path and the companion.

It is never quite safe to think we have done with life.  When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.  These two people each thought their hearts belonged irrevocably to the past; but they both found their walk up that hill very pleasant.  Rosemary thought the Glen minister was by no means as shy and tongue-tied as he had been represented.  He seemed to find no difficulty in talking easily and freely.  Glen housewives would have been amazed had they heard him.  But then so many Glen housewives talked only gossip and the price of eggs, and John Meredith was not interested in either.  He talked to Rosemary of books and music and wide-world doings and something of his own history, and found that she could understand and respond.  Rosemary, it appeared, possessed a book which Mr. Meredith had not read and wished to read.  She offered to lend it to him and when they reached the old homestead on the hill he went in to get it.

The house itself was an old-fashioned gray one, hung with vines, through which the light in the sitting-room winked in friendly fashion.  It looked down the Glen, over the harbour, silvered in the moonlight, to the sand-dunes and the moaning ocean.  They walked in through a garden that always seemed to smell of roses, even when no roses were in bloom.  There was a sisterhood of lilies at the gate and a ribbon of asters on either side of the broad walk, and a lacery of fir trees on the hill’s edge beyond the house.

“You have the whole world at your doorstep here,” said John Meredith, with a long breath.  “What a view—­what an outlook!  At times I feel stifled down there in the Glen.  You can breathe up here.”

“It is calm to-night,” said Rosemary laughing.  “If there were a wind it would blow your breath away.  We get ‘a’ the airts the wind can blow’ up here.  This place should be called Four Winds instead of the Harbour.”

“I like wind,” he said.  “A day when there is no wind seems to me dead.  A windy day wakes me up.”  He gave a conscious laugh.  “On a calm day I fall into day dreams.  No doubt you know my reputation, Miss West.  If I cut you dead the next time we meet don’t put it down to bad manners.  Please understand that it is only abstraction and forgive me—­and speak to me.”