stable, and up the gravel
path to the henhouse. Lifting the rusty latch, he stepped quietly into
the dusky, feathery shelter. "I can think the damned business out,
here," he thought. There was a scuffling "cluck" on the roosts, but when
he sat down on an overturned box, the fowls settled into stillness and,
except for an occasional sleepy squawk, the place was quiet. He drew a
long breath, and dropped his chin on his fist. "Now I'll think," he
said. Then, through the cobwebby windows, he saw in the yellowing west
the new moon, and below it the line of distant hills. An old pine tree
stretched a shaggy branch across the window, and he said to himself that
the moon and the hills and the branch were like a Japanese print.

He took the letter out of his pocket--his very fingers shrinking as he
touched it--and straining his eyes in the gathering dusk, he read it all
through. Then he looked at the moon, which was sliding--sliding behind
the pine. Yes, that ragged branch was very Japanese. If he hadn't gone
out on the river that night with Edith, he would never have met Lily.
The thing he had said on his wedding day, in the meadow, about
"switches," flashed into his mind: "A little thing can throw the
switches."

"Ten minutes in a rowboat," he said,--"and _this_!" One of the hens
clucked. "I'll fight," he said. "Lots of men come up against this sort
of thing, and they hand the whole rotten business over to a lawyer. I'll
fight. Or I'll move.... Perhaps that's the best way? I'll just tell
Eleanor we've got to live in New York. Damn it! she'd ask why? I'll say
I have a job there. Lily'd never be able to find me in New York." The
moon slipped out below the pine, and hung for a dim moment in the haze.
Maurice's mind went through a long and involved plan of concealing his
address from Lily when he moved to New York.... "But what would we live
on while I was finding a job?" ... Suddenly thought stopped short; he
just watched the moon, and listened to a muffled stir among the hens.
Then he took out his knife, and began to cut little notches on the
window sill. "I'll fight," he said, mechanically.

There were running steps on the gravel path, and instantly he was on his
feet. He had the presence of mind to put his hand into a nest, so that
when Edith came in she reproached him for getting ahead of her in
collecting eggs.

"How many have you got? Two? Griselda was on the nest when I started up
the mountain, but I thought there was