Caroline hardly breathed; a nameless awe held her motionless and silent.
"You see, I don't sleep much any more, Jemmy," the old, toneless voice went on, "and hardly any at night. They're very kind, all of them, but I'm—I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."
The ivory tulips gleamed under the stars; the silver lamp, burned lower and lower: its oil was nearly gone.
"And you brought your yellow kitty, too, Jemmy! To think of that! Did they think I wouldn't know my baby? It's only fifty years, ... shall I come now, Jemmy?"
The silver lamp went out. In the starlight Caroline saw the lace cap droop forward, as the the old woman's head settled gently on her breast. Her hands lay clasped on the great volume; her deep-set eyes were closed. She read no more from the book, and the child, awed and sober, stole like a shadow behind the gray wall and left the quiet figure in the carved chair.
Her feet fell into a tiny graveled path, and she drifted aimlessly along it, musing on the meaning of what she had heard. Almost she had persuaded herself that the gray stone building was an enchanted palace, and herself a fairy messenger sent to break the spell, when the delight of pushing through a tiny turnstile and finding a running brook with a waterfall in it close at hand, drove everything else from her mind. The grounds had completely changed their character by now: the turnstile marked the end of cultivation, and the little path, no longer graveled, wound through the wild woodland. Here and there a boulder blocked the way; the undergrowth became dense; great clumps of fern and rhododendron sent out their heavy, rank odors. Now and again the spicy scent of warm pines and cedars prepared the ear for the gentle, ceaseless rustle of their stiff foliage; little scufflings and chitterings at the ground level told of wood-people wakened by the presence of Red Rufus.
A strange whitish bulk that glimmered through the thinning foreground, too big for even a big boulder, too symmetrical and quiet for a waterfall, tempted Caroline on, and she pressed forward hastily, lost in speculation, when a sudden odor foreign to the woods stopped her short at the very edge of a little glade, and she paused, sniffing curiously.
A man, bareheaded, with grizzled curly hair, turned suddenly, not ten feet from her, and stared dumfounded at her, his twisted, brown cigar an inch from his lips.
The torn-out sleeve of her nightgown had bared one side to her waist: the great rent that slit the lower half of the garment left one slender leg uncovered above her white knee. A spray of wild azalea wreathed her dark tumbled hair, and Rufus, his plumy tail curled around her feet in the shadow, and his green eyes flaming, might have been a baby panther. She leaned one hand on the rough bark of a chestnut and gazed with startled eyes at the man; it seemed that the forest must swallow her at a breath from a human throat.
He lifted one hand and pinched the back of the other with it till his face contorted with the pain.