Beyond the bungalow rose a dark strip of woodland, and suddenly, as Deering’s eyes caught sight of it, he became aware that the moon, which had not appeared before that night, seemed to be lingering cosily among the trees. Even a victim of May madness hardly sees moons where they do not exist, but to all intents and purpose this was a moon, a large round moon, on its way down the horizon in the orderly fashion of elderly moons. He turned toward the road, then glanced back quickly to make sure his eyes were not playing tricks upon him. The moon was still there, blandly staring. His powers of orientation had often been tested; on hunting and fishing trips he had ranged the wilderness without a compass, and never come to grief. He was sure that this huge orb was in the north, where no moon of decent habits has any right to be.

With his eyes glued to this phenomenon, he advanced up the slope. When he reached the crest of the meadow the moon still hung where he had first seen it—a most unaccountable moon that apparently lingered to encourage his investigations.

He jumped a wall that separated the meadow from the woodland, and advanced resolutely toward the lunar mystery. He found Stygian darkness in among the pines: the moon, considering its size, shed amazingly little light. He crept toward it warily, and in a moment stood beneath the outward and visible form of a moon cleverly contrived of barrel staves and tissue-paper with a lighted lantern inside, and thrust into the crotch of a tree.

As he contemplated it something struck him—something, he surmised, that had been flung by mortal hand, and a pine-cone caught in his waistcoat collar.

“Please don’t spoil my moon,” piped a voice out of the darkness. “It’s a lot of trouble to make a moon!”

Walking cautiously toward the wall, he saw, against the star dusk of the open, the girl in clown costume who had danced in the meadow. She sat the long way of the wall, her knees clasped comfortably, and seemed in nowise disturbed by his appearance.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I didn’t know it was your moon. I thought it was just the regular old moon that had got lost on the way home.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. I rather hoped somebody would come up to have a look at it; but you’d better run along now. This is private property, you know.”

“Thanks for the hint,” he remarked. “But on a night when moons hang in trees you can’t expect me to be scared away so easily. And besides, I’m an outlaw,” he ended in a tone meant to be terrifying.

She betrayed neither surprise nor fear, but laughed and uttered a “Really!” that was just such a “really” as any well-bred girl might use at a tea, or anywhere else that reputable folk congregate, to express faint surprise. Her way of laughing was altogether charming. A girl who donned a clown’s garb for night prowling and manufactured moons for her own amusement could not have laughed otherwise, he reflected.

“A burglar?” she suggested with mild curiosity.

“Not professionally; but I’m seriously thinking of going in for it. What do you think of burgling as a career?”

“Interesting—rather—I should think,” she replied after a moment’s hesitation, as though she were weighing his suggestion carefully.

“And highway robbery appeals to me—rather. It’s more picturesque, and you wouldn’t have to break into houses. I think I’d rather work in the open.”

“The chances of escape might be better,” she admitted; “but you needn’t try the bungalow down there, for there’s nothing in it worth stealing. I give you my word for that!”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of the bungalow. I had it in mind to begin by holding up a motor. Nobody’s doing that sort of thing just now.”

“Capital!” she murmured pleasantly, as though she found nothing extraordinary in the idea. “So you’re really new at the game.”

“Well, I’ve stolen before, if that’s what you mean, but I didn’t get much fun out of it. I suppose after the first fatal plunge the rest will come easier.”

“I dare say that’s true,” she assented. There was real witchery in the girl’s light, murmurous laugh.

It seemed impossible to surprise her; she was taking him as a matter of course—as though sitting on a wall at night, and talking to a strange young man about stealing was a familiar experience.

“I’ve joined Robin Hood’s band,” he continued. “At least I’ve been adopted by a new sort of Robin Hood who’s travelling round robbing the rich to pay the poor, and otherwise meddling in people’s affairs—the old original Robin Hood brought up to date. If it hadn’t been for him I might be cooling my heels in jail right now. He’s an expert on jails—been in nearly every calaboose in America. He’s tucked me under his wing—persuaded me to take the highway, and not care a hang for anything.”

“How delightful!” she replied, but so slowly that he began to fear that his confidences had alarmed her. “That’s too good to be true; you’re fooling, aren’t you—really?”

His eyes had grown accustomed to the light, and her profile was now faintly limned in the dusk. Hers was the slender face of youth. The silhouette revealed the straightest of noses and the firmest of little chins. She was young, so young that he felt himself struggling in an immeasurable gulf of years as he watched her. Apparently such sophistication as she possessed was in the things of the world of wonder, the happy land of make-believe.

“Keats would have liked a night like this,” she said gently.

Deering was silent. Keats was a person whom he knew only as the subject of a tiresome lecture in his English course at college.

“Bill Blake would have adored it, but he would have had lambs in the pasture,” she added.

“Bill Blake?” he questioned. “Do you mean Billy Blake who was half-back on the Harvard eleven last year?”

She tossed her head and laughed merrily.

“I love that!” she replied lingeringly, as though to prolong her joy in his ignorance. “I was thinking of a poet of that name who wrote a nice verse something like this:

‘I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.’”

No girl had ever quoted poetry to him before, and he was thinking more of her pretty way of repeating the stanza—keeping time with her hands—than of the verse itself.

“Well,” he said, “what’s the rest of it?”

“Oh, there isn’t any rest of it! Don’t you see that there couldn’t be anything more—that it’s finished—a perfect little poem all by itself!”

He played with a loosened bit of stone, meekly conscious of his stupidity. And he did not like to appear stupid before a girl who danced alone in the starlight and hung moons in trees.

“I’m afraid I don’t get it. I’d a lot rather stay by this wall talking to you than go to Jerusalem.”

“You’d be foolish to do that if you really had the end of the golden string, and could follow it to Paradise. I think it means any nice place—just any place where happiness is.”

He was not getting on, and to gain time he bade her repeat the stanza.

“I think I understand now; I’ve never gone in much for poetry, you know,” he explained humbly.

“Burglars are natural poets, I suppose,” she continued. “A burglar just has to have imagination or he can’t climb through the window of a house he has never seen before. He must imagine everything perfectly—the silver on the sideboard, the watch under the pillow, and the butler stealing down the back stairs with a large, shiny pistol in his hand.”

“Certainly,” Deering agreed readily. “And if he runs into a policeman on the way out he’s got to imagine that it’s an old college friend and embrace him.”

“You mustn’t spoil a pretty idea that way!” she admonished in a tone that greatly softened the rebuke. “Come to think of it, you haven’t told me your name yet; of course, if you become a burglar, you will have a great number of names, but I’d like awfully to know your true one.”

“Why?” he demanded.

“Because you seem nice and well brought up for a burglar, and I liked your going up to the moon and poking your finger into it. That makes me feel that I’d like to know you.”

“Well, the circumstances being as they are, and being really a thief, you mustn’t ask me to tell my real name; for all I know you may be a detective in disguise.”

“I’m not—really,” she said—he found her “reallys” increasingly enchanting.

“You might call me Friar Tuck or Little John. I’m travelling with Robin Hood, you remember.”

“Mr. Tuck—that will be splendid!”

“And now that you know my name it’s only fair to tell me yours.”

“Pierrette,” she answered.

“Not really!”

His unconscious imitation of her manner of uttering this phrase evoked another merry laugh.

“Yes, really,” she answered.

“And you live somewhere, of course—not in the tree up there with your moon, but in the bungalow, I suppose.”

“I live wherever I am; that’s the fun of playing all the time,” she replied evasively. “Poste restante, the Little Dipper. How do you like that?”

“But just now your true domicile is the bungalow?” he persisted.

“Oh, I’ve been stopping there for a few days, that’s all. I haven’t any home—not really,” she added as though she found her homelessness the happiest of conditions. She snapped her fingers and recited:

“Wherever stars shine brightest, there my home shall be, In the murmuring forest or by the sounding sea, With overhead the green bough and underfoot the grass, Where only dreams and butterflies ever dare to pass!”

“Is that Keats or Blake?” he ventured timidly.

“It’s me, you goose! But it’s only an imitation—why, Stevenson, of course, and pretty punk as you ought to know. Gracious!”

She jumped down from the wall, on the side toward the bungalow, and stared up at the tree she had embellished with her moon.

“The moon’s gone out, and I’ve got to go in!”

“Please, before you go, when can I see you again?”

“Who knows!” she exclaimed unsympathetically; but she waited as though pondering the matter.

“But I must see you again!” he persisted.

“Oh, I shouldn’t say that it was wholly essential to your happiness—or mine! I can’t meet burglars—socially!”

“Burglars! But I’m not—” he cried protestingly.

She bent toward him with one hand extended pleadingly.

“Don’t say it! Don’t say it! If you say you’re not, you won’t be any fun any more!”

“Well, then we’ll say I am—a terrible freebooter—a bold, bad pirate,” he growled. “Now, may I come?”

She mused a moment, then struck her hands together.

“Come to the bungalow breakfast; that’s a fine idea!”

“And may I bring Hood?” he asked, leaning half-way across the wall in his anxiety to conclude the matter before she escaped. “He’s my boss, you understand, and I’m afraid I can’t shake him.”

“Certainly; bring Mr. Hood. Breakfast at eight.”

“And your home—your address—is there in the bungalow?”

“I’ve told you where my home is, in a verse I made up specially; and my address is care of the Little Dipper—there it is, up there in the sky, all nice and silvery.”

His gaze followed the pointing of her finger. The Little Dipper, as an address for the use of mortals, struck him as rather remote. To his surprise she advanced to the wall, rested her hands upon it, and peered into his face.

“Isn’t this perfectly killing?” she asked in a tone wholly different from that in which she had carried on her share of the colloquy.

He experienced an agreeable thrill as it flashed upon him that this was no child, but a young woman who, knowing the large world, had suddenly awakened to a consciousness that encounters with strange young men by starlight were not to be prolonged forever. In the luminous dusk he noted anew the delicate perfectness of her face, the fine brow about which her hair had tumbled from her late exertions. Her eyes searched his face with honest curiosity—for an instant only.

Then she stepped back, as though to mark a return to her original character, and answered her own question with an air of amused conviction:

“It is perfectly killing!”

His hand fumbled the cap in his pocket.

“Here’s something I found down yonder—your clown’s cap.”

She took it with a murmur of thanks, and darted away toward the bungalow. He heard her light step on the veranda and then a door closed with a sharp bang.

Deering walked back to the inn with his head high and elation throbbing in his pulses. He observed groups of people playing bridge in the inn parlor, and he was filled with righteous contempt for them. The May air had changed his whole nature. He was not the William B. Deering who had meditated killing himself a few hours earlier. A new joy had entered into him; he was only afraid now that he might not live forever!

Hood slept tranquilly, his bed littered with the afternoon’s New York papers which evidently he had been scissoring when he fell asleep. Deering’s attitude toward the strange vagrant had changed since his meeting with Pierrette. Hood might be as mad as the traditional hatter, and yet there was something—indubitably something—about the man that set him apart from the common run of mortals.

Deering lay awake a long time rejoicing in his new life, and when he dreamed it was of balloon-like moons cruising lazily over woods and fields, pursued by innumerable Pierrettes in spotted trousers and pointed caps.

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