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"That's you, Ab Teeftaller, I know you!"

As Abner still did not reply the unseen person snarled out, "Go to hell, then!" and Abner heard the same person insist to someone in an undertone, "Yes, it is Ab Teeftaller. He's jest a damn coward, skeered to face the music. . . ."

When Abner reached the woods at the edge of the village the darkness became so intense that he could keep in the road only by looking up and walking under the path of stars cut out by the inky masses of the trees along both sides of the thoroughfare.

In the woods the night was very cold and still. At the tops of the elevations in his road he entered slightly warmer strata of air. These warmer areas were sometimes perfumed with wild cucumbers or mown clover, which gave him a sense of mounting into some fragrant ethereal pool whence he fancied himself shaking off the earth and rising and rising, perhaps to rejoin Nessie in some purple chamber of the night.

He walked on and on with that vague balm welling up out of his lover's pain, with the poetry of the girl hovering over him sweet with grief.

Far to the south he could hear the rumour of a fox chase which swelled or faded with the configuration of the distant hills. At last the chase was lost to his ears, and he began speculating on how different this night might have been had he gone to Irontown on the preceding day, or if he only had gone in with the train that afternoon. Right at this moment they might have been walking together in the sweetness of this night, with their arms locked about each other's waist, with the perfume of her pale amber hair in his face and her lips and embraces free to him. It seemed fantastic that a few minutes' delay, a hesitation should have erased all this joy utterly and finally. If he only had ridden on into the village on the train, if he had saved even the few minutes he spent talking at the hotel . . . a kind of anguish gripped him at the heaven he had so barely missed. He flung up his hands in the darkness, "Oh, good Lord, why didn't I hurry! What made me git off the train!" An intolerable