In the moonlight the doleful chant droned on, night after night, under the dewy lilacs; and the great horned-owl answered, hooting from the pines; and Silver Heels and I listened from the porch, hand clasping hand in fearsome content. For out in the dark world God was busy shaping the destiny of a people; even the black forest knew it, and thrilled like a vast harp at the touch of the free winds' fingers—unseen fingers, delicate, tentative, groping for the key to a chord of splendid majesty. And when at last the chord should be found and struck, resounding to the deep world's rock foundation, a free people's voices should repeat, singing forever and for all time throughout the earth:
"Amen!"
Meanwhile, stillness, moonlight, and a "Miserere" from the lips of two strange forest-runner folk, free-born and ready when the Lord of all led forth His prophet to command.
On that night I heard a man in the street repeat a name, Washington. And all that night I thought of it, and said it, under my breath. But what it might portend I knew not then.
May ended, smothered in flowers; and with the thickening leaves of June came to us there in the North rumours of the times which were to try men's souls. And again I heard, somewhere in the darkness of the village streets, the name I heard before; and that night, too, I lay awake, forming the word with silent lips, close to my young wife's breast.
The full, yellow moon of June creamed all our garden now; Mount and Renard sat a-squat upon the grass, chin on fist, to muse and muse and wait—for what? The King of England did not know; but all the world was waiting, too.
Then, one dim morning, while yet the primrose light tinted the far hills, I awoke to see Silver Heels in her white night-robe, leaning from the casement, calling out to me in a strange, frightened voice: "Michael! Michael! They are coming over the hills—over the hills, dear heart, to take you with them!"
At the window, sniffing the fresh dawn, I listened.
"Footfalls in the hills!" she said, trembling. "Out of the morning men are coming! God make me brave! God make me brave!"
For a long time we stood silent; the village slept below us; the stillness of the dawn remained unbroken, save by a golden-robin's note, fluting from a spectral elm.