Then he went to fasten the window-doors securely.
Outside he saw the uncanny glimmer of candles across the lawn. He had
half a mind to go out and extinguish them--but he did not. So he went
upstairs and the house was quiet. Faint crumbs of snow were falling
outside.

When Jim woke in the morning Aaron had gone. Only on the floor were two
packets of Christmas-tree candles, fallen from the stranger's pockets.
He had gone through the drawing-room door, as he had come. The housemaid
said that while she was cleaning the grate in the dining-room she heard
someone go into the drawing-room: a parlour-maid had even seen someone
come out of Jim's bedroom. But they had both thought it was Jim himself,
for he was an unsettled house mate.

There was a thin film of snow, a lovely Christmas morning.

CHAPTER IV. "THE PILLAR OF SALT"

Our story will not yet see daylight. A few days after Christmas, Aaron
sat in the open shed at the bottom of his own garden, looking out on the
rainy darkness. No one knew he was there. It was some time after six in
the evening.

From where he sat, he looked straight up the garden to the house. The
blind was not drawn in the middle kitchen, he could see the figures of
his wife and one child. There was a light also in the upstairs window.
His wife was gone upstairs again. He wondered if she had the baby ill.
He could see her figure vaguely behind the lace curtains of the bedroom.
It was like looking at his home through the wrong end of a telescope.
Now the little girls had gone from the middle room: only to return in a
moment.

His attention strayed. He watched the light falling from the window
of the next-door house. Uneasily, he looked along the whole range of
houses. The street sloped down-hill, and the backs were open to the
fields. So he saw a curious succession of lighted windows, between which
jutted the intermediary back premises, scullery and outhouse, in dark
little blocks. It was something like the keyboard of a piano: more
still, like a succession of musical notes. For the rectangular planes
of light were of different intensities, some bright and keen, some soft,
warm, like candle-light, and there was one surface of pure red light,
one or two were almost invisible, dark green. So the long scale of
lights seemed to trill across the darkness, now bright, now dim,
swelling and sinking. The effect was strange.

And thus the whole private life of the street was threaded in lights.