Not a soul was awake, and the stillness was awful. It was a place of tombs. And those tombs were haunted by dreams. Away towards the west, the moon lay on the steep-sloping edge of a rugged cloud, appearing to have rolled half-way down from its lofty peak, and about to be launched off its baseless bulk into
"the empty, vast, and wandering air."
In the middle of the large square of the little gray town she stood and looked around her. All one side lay in shade; the greater part of the other three lay in moonlight. The old growth of centuries, gables and fronts�-stepping out into the light, retreating into the shadow�-outside stairs and dark gateways, stood up in the night warding a townful of sleepers. Not one would be awake now. Ah yes! there was light in the wool-carder's window. His wife was dying. That light over the dying, wiped the death-look from the face of the sleeping town, Annie roused herself and passed on, fearing to be seen. It was the only thing to be afraid of. But the stillness was awful. One silence only could be more awful: the same silence at noon-day.
So she passed into the western road and through the trees to the bridge over the Wan Water. They stood so still in the moonlight! And the smell from the withering fields laid bare of the harvest and breathing out their damp odours, came to her mixed with the chill air from the dark hills around, already spiced with keen atoms of frost, soon to appear in spangly spikes. Beneath the bridge the river flowed maunderingly, blundering out unintelligible news of its parent bog and all the dreary places it had come through on its way to the strath of Glamerton, which nobody listened to but one glad-hearted, puzzle-brained girl, who stood looking down into it from the bridge when she ought to have been in bed and asleep. She was not far from Clippenstrae, but she could not go there so early, for her aunt would be frightened first and angry next. So she wandered up the stream to the old church-forsaken churchyard, and sat on one of the tombstones. It became very cold as the morning drew on. The moon went down; the stars grew dim; the river ran with a livelier murmur; and through all the fine gradations of dawn-�cloudy wind and grey sky�-the gates of orange and red burst open, and the sun came forth rejoicing. The long night was over. It had not been a very weary one; for Annie had thoughts of her own, and like the earth in the warm summer nights, could shine and flash up through the dark, seeking the face of God in the altar-flame of prayer. Yet she was glad when the sun came. With the first bubble of the spring of light bursting out on the hill-top, she rose and walked through the long shadows of the graves down to the river and through the long shadows of the stubble down the side of the river, which shone in the morning light like a flowing crystal of delicate brown-�and so to Clippenstrae, where she found her aunt still in her night-cap. She was standing at the door, however, shading her eyes with her hand, looking abroad as if for some one that might be crossing hitherward from the east. She did not see Annie approaching from the north.
"What are ye luikin' for, auntie?"
"Naething. Nae for you, ony gait, lassie."
"Weel, ye see, I'm come ohn luikit for. But ye was luikin' for somebody, auntie."
"Na. I was only jist luikin'."
Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul's hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their flesh cry out.
Lead, lead me on, my Hopes. I know that ye are true and not vain. Vanish from my eyes day after day, but arise in new forms. I will follow your holy deception;�-follow till ye have brought me to the feet of my Father in Heaven, where I shall find you all with folded wings spangling the sapphire dusk whereon stands His throne, which is our home.