"Or rather?" St. Vincent suggested.
Frona made no answer, and they walked on without speech. She was still
under the spell of the evening, and the exaltation which had come to
her as Nora had not yet departed. Besides, she read between the lines
of St. Vincent's conversation, and was oppressed by the timidity which
comes over woman when she faces man on the verge of the greater
intimacy.
It was a clear, cold night, not over-cold,--not more than forty
below,--and the land was bathed in a soft, diffused flood of light
which found its source not in the stars, nor yet in the moon, which was
somewhere over on the other side of the world. From the south-east to
the northwest a pale-greenish glow fringed the rim of the heavens, and
it was from this the dim radiance was exhaled.
Suddenly, like the ray of a search-light, a band of white light
ploughed overhead. Night turned to ghostly day on the instant, then
blacker night descended. But to the southeast a noiseless commotion
was apparent. The glowing greenish gauze was in a ferment, bubbling,
uprearing, downfalling, and tentatively thrusting huge bodiless hands
into the upper ether. Once more a cyclopean rocket twisted its fiery
way across the sky, from horizon to zenith, and on, and on, in
tremendous flight, to horizon again. But the span could not hold, and
in its wake the black night brooded.
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