hecked suit with the red thread, the one he would wear to the
sap-boiling. He heard approaching footsteps, and, hastily crumpling the
paper and small box into a compact unit, he flung it into a corner of the
wardrobe, behind a heap of linen.

XV

It was comparatively a short distance to the elder Entriken's farm, and,
rather than invent a laborious explanation of the horse's absence all
night, Gordon walked. Numberless excuses offered him plausible reason for
his own delayed return home.--It was better to say nothing to Lettice of
his actual intention; she was already suspicious of his sudden interest in
local gatherings.

The road beyond Greenstream village crossed a brook and mounted by sharp
turns the western range. The day had faded to amethyst, pale in the
translucent vault of the sky, deepening in the valley; the plum-colored
smoke of evening fires ascended in tenuous columns to an incredible
height. He walked rapidly, with the oppressed heart that had lately grown
familiar, the sense of imminence, the feeling of advancing into a vague,
towering shadow. That last sensation was at once new and familiar--where
before had he been conscious of a vast, indefinable peril, blacker than
night, looming implacably before him? He summoned his old hardihood and
advanced over the still, bosky side of the mountain.

He descended, beyond the ridge, into the fact of evening accomplished. At
the base of the range he crossed a softly-swelling expanse of
close-cropped grass, skirted a bog and troop of naked-seeming birches, and
came in view of the maple grove toward which he was bound.

The maple trees towered compact and majestic over the level sod, holding
their massed foliage black against the green sky. Low in the right the new
moon hung like a gold fillet above the odorous, crepuscular earth; and, at
the base of the trees, the fires were like bubbling, crimson sealing wax
poured into the deeper, indigo gloom.

As Gordon advanced he saw a number of vehicles, from which the horses had
been taken and tied to an improvised railing. Figures moved darkly against
the flames; beyond familiar features flickered like partial, painted masks
on the night. In the grove the sap, stirred in the great iron kettles,
kept up a constant, choking minor; the smooth trunks of the trees swept up
from the unsteady radiance into the obscurity of invisible branches looped
with silver strings of stars.

Blurred forms moved everywhere. He s