MacIan was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after
dark--especially upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for
him always a positive magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain
to those of a robuster attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full
as poetical as Diana; but it is not a question of poetry in the
matured and intellectual sense of the word. It is a question of a
certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is in the strict and
literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our bodily eyes
it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler thing;
a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite
solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge
celestial snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and
fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanized
imprisonment to go out as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night,
when the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the
garden until almost the strongest tints to be seen were the
strong soft blue of the sky and the large lemon moon. He was
walking with his face turned up to it in that rather half-witted
fashion which might have excused the error of his keepers; and as
he gazed he became aware of something little and lustrous flying
close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked off the
moon. At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction in
his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes. Then he
thought it was a falling star; only it did not fall. It jerked
awkwardly up and down in a way unknown among meteors and
strangely reminiscent of the works of man. The next moment the
thing drove right across the moon, and from being silver upon
blue, suddenly became black upon silver; then although it passed