ing in between the trees at the
pillared porch, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and laborious, as
though he had been running or fighting. Once I thought he struck out at
something with a vicious fist. Then his trouble was gone, between two
winks, and he was gone too, up the walk and up the steps, without any
to-do about it. I don't know whether he tapped on the door or not. It
was open directly. I caught a passing glimpse of Sympathy Gibbs in the
black aperture; the door closed on them both, and the Pillar House was
dead again.

Now this was an odd way for Minister Malden to fast and pray in the
Wilderness--odd enough, one would say, to keep me waiting there a while
to see what would come of it all. But it didn't. I had had enough of
mysteries for one Summer's night, or at any rate I had enough by the
time I got my short legs, full tilt, into the shore street. For I had
caught a fleeting glimpse, on the way, of a watcher in the shadow behind
the _other_ box-tree--Yen Sin, the heathen, with a surprised eyeball
slanting at me over one shoulder.

* * *

Among the most impressive of the phenomena of life, as noted in my
thirteenth year, is the amazing way in which a community can change
while one is away from it a month. Urkey village at the beginning of my
'teens seemed to me much the same Urkey village upon which I had first
opened my eyes. And then I went to make a visit with my uncle Orville
Means in Gillyport, just across the Sound, and when I came back on the
packet I could assure myself with all the somber satisfaction of the
returning exile that I would scarcely have known the old place.

Gramma Pilot's cow had been poisoned. There had been a fire in the
Selectmen's room at Town Hall. Amber Matheson had left Mrs. Wharf's
Millinery and set up for herself, opposite the Eastern School. And Mate
Snow, all of a sudden, had bought the old Pons house, on the hill
hanging high over the town, and gone to live there. With a leap, and as
it were behind my back, he sat there dominating the village and the
harbor and the island--our Great Man.

He took Minister Malden with him, naturally, out of the two rooms over
the store, into one room in the third story of the house on the
hill--where Sympathy Gibbs could see him if she chose to look that way,
as frankly and ignominiously a dependent as any baron's chaplain in the
Golden Days.

"She'd have done better with Mate, after all," folks began to say.

But of all the