“It’s gone! It’s done it!” she sighed at last, when the rat, emerging from the water without so much as one shake of its sleek sides, slid off along its mud-channel to its bed in the reed-roots. “It’s gone! And you did make it swim! I liked to see it. Let’s go rat-swimming often. It’s wonderful!”

She began walking along the riverbank in the direction leading away from Blacksod, gazing intently and rapturously at the sluggish brown stream.

Wolf followed her, but he surreptitiously glanced at his watch, and discovered, as he suspected, that it was already late in the afternoon.

“You can’t tell when twilight begins,” he thought to himself, “when the sky is all twilight.”