All was darkness, for the moon was not yet up, and he felt a strange sensation of ghostliness in himself--awake and out of doors, when he ought to be asleep and unconscious in bed.

He had never been out so late before, and felt as if walking in the region of the dead, existing when and where he had no business to exist.

For it was the time Nature kept for her own quiet, and having once put her children to bed--hidden them away with the world wiped out of them--enclosed them in her ebony box, as George Herbert says--she did not expect to have her hours of undress and meditation intruded upon by a venturesome school-boy.

Yet she let him pass.

He put on his shoes and hurried to the road.