eyes was a shine which seemed a
refraction of the silver-gray beams of the moon. There was about her
gaze a something heavy, mournful, and boding which old Dave could not
understand, but which made him think of the expression she had lifted in
the old homesteading days toward the hail-cloud that swept from eastward
to beat down their little, hard-sown crop.

"They 's trouble a-comin'." The voice was hers--at least it came from
her direction--yet it seemed to Old Dalton that the words came not from
her, but _through_ her. "Ey, Davie ... there 's trouble a-comin' ...
trouble a-comin'. Ess time you was movin' ... movin' on...."

Old Dave Dalton had never, in the long, long course of his years, had a
sensation like that which took him, as the queer voice melted away,
blending imperceptibly with the homely rustlings and lowings of the farm
night. The ache he had carried in his heart for those last weeks seemed
suddenly to bulge and burst, like a bubble. The old moon, the hills and
trees and trail of his long travel; the night, the world, and the odd
old figure over against him, were bundled up with a sudden vast
infolding in a blanket of black, a corner of which seemed thrust against
his mouth, gagging him and cutting off his breath. He was lifted, lifted
as in a great wind--lifted by shoulders, crown, and knees, and whirled
around--around ... then set again on his feet very softly, with the
blackness gone and the clear country night above him as before.

He should have been giddy after that cataclysm, but he stood upright and
steady. He should have been tired and shaken, but he was fresh and calm.
He should have been heavy and stiff and held to the earth by the ball
and chain of a hundred years; yet he seemed scarcely more solid,
scarcely less light, than an embodied wind. He should have been (for
the atmosphere of the home in which you have dwelt for a century is not
so easily dissipated) a doddering old corporeality, yet he felt he was
now all thought and glorious essence of life. He should have seen on the
step that old wife who had stood so uncannily by while he sweat over his
wood-splitting; yet the presence that moved toward him from the pine
sill, though wholly familiar and intimate and full of kind emanations,
had neither wrinkles nor grayness nor any of the attributes and
qualities of mortality. He should have bespoken that kindred presence in
halting colloquialities, yet the greeting he gave flowed from him in th