They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one side of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into purple darkness.
"There's the moon."
"God! it looks like a pumpkin."
"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north."
"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"
They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.
"Sounds almost like a barrage."
Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's Hellas. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.
"Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks in a dissolving dream."
The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of the moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!