Across the lake sheet lightning began to play about the horizon.
Derek heard the gate click and he listened for voices or footfalls on the drive. The silence was profound. Then a flash of lightning more vivid than what had gone before discovered a small, white figure but a yard or two away. He rose and went to it.
"Is it you, Fawnie?" he whispered. "Anything wrong?"
She caught his hand in her fingers and drew him away from the house.
"Come and walk with me," she breathed. "I'm lonesome."
He took her hand and led her across the lawn between the tall trunks of the locust and walnut trees that rose like pillars of some dark aisle about them. They crossed the old strawberry bed, now weed-grown, and marked for the plow, and came to the bank of the stream.
He emptied his pipe and dropped it in his pocket. His arm drew her to his side.
"What are you lonely for?"
"You. . . . I want to go out in the canoe."
"In this inky darkness?"
"I like it. It's awful to feel the way I do. Like as if my blood was dancin' in my body. If I could get out in that canoe I'd feel nice and quiet."
"All right," said Derek. He felt suddenly restless himself, and the thought of being in a canoe with Fawnie on the vast darkness of the lake was soothing. "But keep very quiet. Don't speak above a whisper. And keep hold of me. We'll scramble down the bank right here."
She clutched his sleeve, and the two descended the steep bank overgrown with brambles and wild roses. The stream that had gushed so freshly on the night of his arrival at Grimstone, now trickled thinly over the ledges of its chalky
