He walked slowly forward under a starless sky, revolving his adventure. He recognized clearly enough that his first infatuation had changed its quality not a little. Gerda was now not only a maddeningly desirable girl. She was a girl with a definite personality of her own. That birdlike whistling! Never had he known such a thing was possible! It accounted as nothing else could do for her queer, unembarrassed silences. In fact, it was the expression of her silences⁠—and not only of hers! It was, as he recalled its full effect upon him, the expression of just those mysterious silences in Nature which all his life long he had, so to speak, waited upon and worshipped. That strange whistling was the voice of those green pastures and those blackthorn-hedges, not as they were when human beings were conscious of them, but as they were in that indescribable hour just before dawn, when they awoke in the darkness to hear the faint, faint stirrings⁠—upon the air⁠—of the departing of the nonhuman powers of the night!