Coromandel! [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The girl leaned out of the casement, the leaded panes and all her face dark in the shadow of the overhanging thatch. The clock in the church-tower struck twelve. The cracked notes dropped slowly, one by one, into the moon-lit well of the green, and ran about the lanes of the village and crept down in softer echoes from the slope of the Plain beyond. The churchyard lay below the girl's window. The gravestones shone silently with the pale fire of the night, and the shadows of them knelt in square blocks, like patient mourners, on the humps of the graves. The wind moved warm from the valley to the Plain, and summer was nearly gone. The girl sighed and rested her weight heavily on her elbows and waited. She was naked, warm, and kindly. She heard nothing, and thought of nothing but her waiting, although the wind made music in the thatch so close above her head. The young man moved slowly under the edge of the Plain, in the shadow of the last hedge. He moved as though watchers lay in wait for him in the moonlight. He paused at a tussock of grass, and again in the shadow of a group of elms, and looked ahead, to right and left, and behind, then he moved on. He heard music in the silence and saw men where he knew there were none; so he had forgottén the girl and her waiting. The vale dipped down to his right. There, lying in the moonlight, the wheat was cut and the fields were bare and the orchards heavy. He was moving along the border between the cultivation and the Plain. He liked best to prowl that line, especially at night, because the fields made him thinlc of people, but the Plain was empty and full of lonely music, and he needed both to build substance for his dreams. He stopped and looked about him with a frown. It was good to suinmon phantoms from his mind to go beside him and so make the familiar stränge. But he must not do that ali the time, or soon he would not be able to teli which things he had made and which God had made. In truth this was only one night of a thousand he had known like it, only a summer night. The owl screeched from