He could not put into words just how it affected him. From first to
last, even through his days of crime, it had been the one thing
constant--the unchanging symbol--that in any manner connected his
present with his shadowed past. It had served to recall in him, more
than any other one thing, the fact that there was a past to look
for--the assurance that somewhere, far away, he had been something more
than a reckless criminal in city slums. The love he had for it was an
old love, proving to him conclusively that his past life had been
intimately associated, some way, with moonlight falling in open places.
Yet the mood that was wakened in him went even farther. It was as if the
sight of the argent satellite stirred and moved deep-buried instincts
innate in him, in no way connected with any experience of his immediate
life. Rather it was as if his love for it were a racial love, reaching
back beyond his own life: something inborn in him. It was as if he were
recalling it, not alone from his own past, but from a racial existence a
thousand-thousand years before his own birth. His memory was strangely
stifled, but, oh, he remembered the moon! Forest had spoken of stimuli!
The mere sight of the blue-white beams was the best possible stimulus to
call him to himself.

Ezra Melville and he walked under it, talking little at first, and
mostly the old, blue twinkling eyes watched his face. Seemingly with no
other purpose than to escape the bright glare of the street lights they
walked northward along the docks, below Queen Anne Hill, passed old Rope
Walk, through the suburb of Ballard, finally emerging on the Great
Northern Railroad tracks heading toward Vancouver and the Canadian
border. For all that Ben's long legs had set a fast pace Melville kept
cheerfully beside him throughout the long walk, seemingly without trace
of fatigue.