II.
It was a little after ten, I think, when I left the professor's house,
where I had been spending the evening, and started on my homeward way.
As I walked along the road the thought of Mabel haunted me. I
wondered whether I ever should be a professor, like her father, and
ended with concluding that the next best thing to being one's self a
professor would be to be a professor's son-in-law. But, somehow, I
wasn't at all sure that Mabel cared anything about me.
"Things are not what they seem," I murmured to myself, "and the real
Mabel may be a very different creature from the Mabel whom I know."
There was not much comfort in that thought, but nevertheless I could
not get rid of it. I glanced up to the big round face of the moon,
which had a large ring of mist about its neck; and looking more
closely I thought I saw a huge floundering body, of which the moon was
the head, crawling heavily across the sky, and stretching a long misty
arm after me. I hurried on, not caring to look right or left; and I
suppose I must have taken the wrong turn, for as I lifted my eyes, I
found myself standing under the willow-tree at the creek where Mabel
and I had been sitting in the afternoon. The locusts, with their
shrill metallic voices, kept whirring away in the grass, and I heard
their strange hissing sh-h-h-h-h, now growing stronger, then weakening
again, and at last stopping abruptly, as if to say: "Didn't I do
well?" But the blue-eyed violets shook their heads, and that means in
their language: "No, I don't think so at all.
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