Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the horizon.

Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses.  The sun has begun to twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel and make itself known to the doves in the stone belfry of the South Church.  The patches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse grass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the mill-pond—­it will be steel-blue later—­is as smooth and white as if it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum’s Marble Yard.  Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of the village is seen a square, lap-streaked building, painted a disagreeable brown, and surrounded on three sides by a platform,—­one of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on a branch thread of the Great Sagamore Railway.

Listen!  That is the jingle of the bells on the baker’s cart as it begins its rounds.  From innumerable chimneys the curdled smoke gives evidence that the thrifty housewife—­or, what is rarer in Stillwater, the hired girl—­has lighted the kitchen fire.

The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court—­the last house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite alone—­sends up no smoke.  Yet the carefully trained ivy over the porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps, intimate that the place is not unoccupied.  Moreover, the little schooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now heading due west, has a new top-sail.  It is a story-and-a-half cottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous, unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full upon it.  The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as those on the extensions, are tightly closed.  The sun appears to beat in vain at the casement sof this silent house, which has a curiously sullen and defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfully barricaded itself against the approach of morning; yet if one were standing in the room that leads from the bed-chamber on the ground-floor—­the room with the latticed window—­one would see a ray of light thrust through a chink of the shutters, and pointing like a human finger at an object which lies by the hearth.

This finger, gleaming, motionless, and awful in its precision, points to the body of old Mr. Lemuel Shackford, who lies there dead in his night-dress, with a gash across his forehead.

In the darkness of that summer night a deed darker than the night itself had been done in Stillwater.

II

That morning, when Michael Hennessey’s girl Mary—­a girl sixteen years old—­carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent house, she was nearly a quarter of hour later than usual, and looked forward to being soundly rated.

“He’s up and been waiting for it,” she said to herself, observing the scullery door ajar.  “Won’t I ketch it!  It’s him for growling and snapping at a body, and it’s me for always being before or behind time, bad luck to me.  There’s no plazing him.”