“Now,” directed David, “here is a broken tree leaning against the wall. Up you go.”
With a little assistance and not much scrambling, she clambered to the top of the wall. They were at the back of the house here, with the nearest line of blackened ruin not a hundred feet away. A spreading willow grew so close to the wall that its feathery boughs brushed Elizabeth’s hair and passed smooth fingers across her cheek. The stones were warm under their hands, from the past day’s sun, their heads were among the leaves and birds’ nests, very high, it seemed, above the ground. The whole desolate place before them was very still.
“The moon will be up presently,” David whispered, “so I think It will come soon, while it is still dark.”
Betsey trembled a little in the warm night air, but said nothing. The minutes passed, then a half hour, finally the hour itself struck from a spire in the village. The strokes sounded very thin and far away as the night wind carried them. A faint cow bell jingled in a distant field, a comfortable, friendly sound that Elizabeth missed when it moved and died away. They began to relax their tense muscles as the time passed slowly, to swing their feet and to talk almost above their breath.
“It may not be coming to-night,” said David, “we will not wait much longer.”
“That man at the Reynolds’ gate, I wonder what he wanted,” observed Betsey. “It was rather late for just ordinary visitors. Did you notice him, David?”
“When the light fell on him I thought I had seen him before,” he answered. “Yet after all it was no one I knew, just a man I saw in the village this morning by the post office.”
Elizabeth was not greatly heeding, for the round, golden rim of the moon was showing almost opposite them, above the jagged heaps of ruins. Slowly it rose, spreading more light through the trees, until it was half above the horizon and shone, an orange semicircle, there above the old house. She was about to speak when David touched her elbow.
“Look beyond that pine tree,” he whispered.
The little glow-worm light was visible at last. It was, at first, half hidden by the bushes, but it moved slowly along, swinging near the ground, hesitating, almost coming to a standstill, but still always making some progress. It moved along the ruined walls, it came nearer and nearer. To both of them it became evident that whatever it was, whatever carried it, must presently pass opposite them and be darkly outlined against the glowing background of the moon. They had only to wait and they would see.