columns casting
purple shadows on a milky floor. Fairy lights winked in hooded windows
like deep-set eyes, and a soft warm haze lapped round him dreamily,
lulling his senses.

Joe had left the road-camp and tramped three miles into town. In the
dusk he had come upon it unawares; it seemed quite deserted. Very
quietly he had come through the back lanes, and now it lay before him,
its heart open in a sort of whispered confidence. Crude, inert,
makeshift sort of place it might betray itself to be in daylight, it
now lay snug and warm and breathing in its cluster of trees. It had
gathered its brood to it, its warm lights blinking red, and above,
clear liquid moonlight. Joe walked along slowly, an outsider, and yet
feeling himself slipping somehow into the warmth and protection of the
street. The odour of the burning leaves was heady, a superdistillate
of memories. October and moonlight and burning leaves! It meant nuts
and wine-sap apples, lingering in the dusk, watching the bull-bats
rise. It meant hot supper and a ravenous appetite and a slow roasting
before an open fire. Sharp little pictures flashed before his eyes as
he walked along, and he fancied he could hear the soft crunch of buggy
wheels in the dried leaves and the pad-pad of hoofs. It all seemed
wrapped up in the same parcel with his childhood, stored away
somewhere in musty archives. You couldn't pull out one without
stirring up all the others. He half closed his eyes and peered through
his lashes down a sharp black line of roofs like a knife edge against
a liquid, shimmering sky, down a broad ghostly band of silver white
that was the road, all flecked and mottled with leaf shadows that
moved slowly to and fro. He paused a moment. He scarcely dared breathe
lest the whole thing vanish. A fairy touch on his arm, light as
thistle-down, a subtle sense of warmth and a dim, intangible
fragrance, and he started, blinking, and then walked on. Something was
dry and dusty in his throat. "Golly, the old place sorta gets next to
you on a night like this," he thought. "Guess I'd better get in.
They'll think I'm nuts, mooning around on the street all night."

He came to a long stretch of wooden picket fence, beyond it a silver
plaque of moon-splashed grass, the house all hollow-eyed and gaunt,
like a thing watching. As he approached the gate a man came hurrying
out, his head hunched forward on his shoulders. Joe stood aside to let
him pass. The man peered sharply at him fr