hands round. But if it had to come so, in violence and fear, then nobody
need feel the sin of it on his soul--nobody excepting the old man
Bickers, him that told Daniel. For 'twas from that day he began to take
it on.

"I saw it myself. There was Daniel come home from other parts where his
mother had kept him, out of gossip's way, bright as you please and
knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains. And so I say the sin
lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it
out to Daniel, Daniel changed. 'Twas like he'd heard his doom, and went
to it. Bickers is dead a long time now, but may the Lord God lay eternal
damnation on his soul!"

Even then there was no heat; the curse had grown a formula. Having come
to the end, the old man's eyes tumbled down painlessly out of the void
and discovered the shears in his hand.

"Dear me, that's so," he said to himself. One thought was enough at a
time. He fell to work again. The steady "clip-clip-clip" moved off
slowly along the hedge. Not once did he remember; not once as the
indefatigable worker shuffled himself out of sight around the house did
he look back with any stirring of recollection at the boyish figure
lying there as still as a shadow cast in the deep grass.

A faintly lop-sided moon swam in the zenith. For three days now that
rare clarity had hung in the sky, and for three nights the moon had
grown. Its benign, poisonous illumination flowed down steeply through
the windows of the dark chamber where Christopher huddled on the bed's
edge, three pale, chill islands spread on the polished floor.