I stood in the doorway of the wall, and looked
out on the wild: suddenly, by some strange reaction, it seemed out of
creation's doors, out in the illimitable, given up to the bare, to the
space that had no walls! A shiver ran through me; I turned back among the
yews. It was early; I would wait yet a while! If he were already there,
he too would enjoy the calm of a lovely little wait.
A small wind came searching about, and found, and caressed me. I turned
to it; it played with my hair, and cooled my face. After a while, I left
the alley, passed out, closed the door behind me, and went straying
through the broken ground of the wilderness, among the low bushes,
meandering, as if with some frolicsome brook for a companion--a brook of
capricious windings--but still coming nearer to the fence that parted the
wilderness from the heath, my eyes bent down, partly to avoid the
hillocks and bushes, and partly from shyness of the moment when first I
should see him who was in my heart and somewhere near. Softly the moon
rose, round and full. There was still so much light in the sky that she
made no sudden change, and for a moment I did not feel her presence or
look up. In front of me, the high ground of the moor sank into a hollow,
deeply indenting the horizon-line: the moon was rising just in the gap,
and when I did look up, the lower edge of her disc was just clear of the
earth, and the head of a man looking over the fence was in the middle of
the great moon.
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