[ "'YOU'RE A LIAR—YOU'RE ALL LIARS'" ]
[ "'IT IS NOT TRUE,' HALF SHRIEKED CELESTE" ]
THE SHERRODS
CHAPTER I.
THE SOFT SUMMER NIGHT.
Through the soft summer night came the sounds of the silence that is heard only when nature sleeps, imperceptible except as one feels it behind the breath he draws or perhaps realizes it in the touch of an unexpected branch or flower. The stillness of a silence that is not silent; a stillness so dead that the croaking of frogs, the chirping of crickets, the barking of dogs, the hooting of owls, the rustling of leaves are not heard, although the air is heavy with those voices of the night—the stillness of a night in the country. All human activity apparently at an end, all sign of life lost in somber shadows. The ceaseless croaking, the chirping, the hooting, the rustling themselves make up this unspeakable silence—this sweet, unconscious solitude.
A country lane, dark and gloomy, awaited the moon from the clouded east. Lighted only here and there by the twinkling windows in roadside homes, it lay asleep in its bed of dust. Far off it straggled into a village, but out there in the country it was lost to the world with the setting of the sun.
The faint glow from the window of a cottage poured its feeble but willing self into the night as if seeking to dispel the gloom, dimly conscious that its efforts were unappreciated and undesired. Down at the rickety front gate, cloaked in blackness, stood two persons. Darkness could not hide the world from them, for the whole world dwelt within the confines of a love-lit garden gate. For them there was no sound of life except their tender voices, no evidence that a world existed beyond the posts between which they stood, his arm about her, her head upon his breast. They spoke softly in the silence about them.
"And to-morrow night at this time you will be mine—all mine," he murmured. She looked again into his face, indistinct in the night.