ake once more before
he--and the sun--returned.

The amado went back as if of itself. In an instant Ume's face was
among the dew-wet leaves of the plum tree. Oh, it was sweet! The
night smelled of silence and the stars. She threw back her head to
drink it like a liquid. She lifted the insect in its cage. By holding
it high, against a star of special brightness, she could see the tiny
bit of life gazing at her through its bars. She opened the door of the
cage, and set it among the twigs of the plum. Then barefooted,
ungirdled, with hair unbound, she stepped down upon the stone beneath
the tree, and then to the garden path.

IV

The pebbles of the garden were slippery and cold under the feet that
pressed them. Also they hurt a little. Ume longed to return for her
straw sandals, but this freedom of the night was already far too
precious for jeopardy. She caught her robe about her throat and was
glad of the silken shawl of her long hair. How thickly shone the
stars! It must be close upon the hour of their waning, yet how big and
soft; and how companionable! She stretched her arms up to them, moving
as if they drew her down the path. They were more real, indeed, than
the dim and preternatural space in which she walked.

She looked slowly about upon that which should have been commonplace
and found the outlines alone to be unaltered. There were the hillock,
the house, the thick hedge-lines square at the corners with black bars
hard as wood against the purple night; there were the winding paths and
little courts of open gravel. She could have put her hand out, saying,
"Here, on this point, should be the tall stone lantern; here, in this
sheltered curve, a fern." Both lantern and fern would have been in
place; and yet, despite these evidences of the usual, all that once
made the sunlit garden space an individual spot, was, in this dim,
ghostly air, transformed. The spirit of the whole had taken on weird
meaning. It was as if Mata's face looked suddenly upon her with the
old abbot's eyes. Fantastic possibilities crouched, ready to spring
from every shadow. The low shrubs held themselves in attitudes of
flight. This was a world in which she had no part. She knew herself a
paradox, the violator of a mood; but the enchantment held her.

She had reached now the edge of the pond. It was a surface of polished
lacquer, darker than the night, and powdered thick with the gold of
reflected stars. Lean