gold.  His hand strayed out to his pipes, lying beside him with mute, gaping mouths.  “The Gold o’ the Glamour,” he murmured to himself, and as he broke the silence with the old tune faintly blown, he felt the wood peopled about him as of yore with twilight forms.  Unseen bright eyes gazed at him from behind tree-trunks, and the branches were populous with invisible, kindly listeners.  The very hush was symbolic of the consciousness of the wood that he was there again.  There was none of the careless commonplace of rustling leaves, and snapping twigs, and indifferent, fearless bird-song.  In the death-like still he felt life quivering and observant with a thousand innocent, curious, welcoming eyes.

When he had quavered through the last note he let the pipes fall and gazed about him with a smile, like a happy old child.  The sun sank behind the mountain as he looked, and he pulled himself heavily up.  His way to the farm lay over bare upland pastures where his feet, accustomed for years to the yielding prarie levels, stumbled and tripped among the loose stones.  Twilight came on rapidly, so that he found himself several times walking blindly through fairy rings of fern.  He crossed himself and bowed his head three times to the west, where the evening star now shone pale in the radiance of the glowing sky.  Between two of the ridges he wandered into a bog where his feet, hot in their heavy boots, felt gratefully the oozing, cool brown water.

And then, as he stepped into the lane, dark with dense maple-trees and echoing faintly with the notes of the hermit thrush, he saw the light of the little house glimmer through the trees in so exactly the spot where his hungering eyes sought it that his heart gave a great hammering leap in his breast.

He knocked at the door, half doubtfully, for all his eagerness.  It might be she lived elsewhere in the parish now.  He had schooled himself to this thought so that it was no surprise, although a heavy disappointment, when the door was opened by a small dark man holding a sleeping baby on his arm.  Timothy lowered his voice and the man gave a brief and hushed answer.  He spoke in a strong French-Canadian accent.  “Moira O’Donnell?  I nevaire heard before.  Go to ze house on ze hill—­mebbe zey know—­”

He closed the door, and, through the open window, Timothy saw him sit down, still holding the baby and looking at it as though the interrupting episode were already forgotten.  The old man shivered with a passing eerie sense of being like a ghost knocking vainly at the doors of the living.  He limped up the hill, and knocked on the kitchen door of the old Wilcox house.  To his eyes, dilated with the wide dusk of the early evening, the windows seemed to blaze with light, and when the door was opened to him he shaded his eyes, blinking fast against the rays of a lamp held high in the hand of a round, little woman who looked at him with an impersonal kindness.  His heart beat so he could not speak.