somewhere in China, and on her feet were the slippers embroidered for
her by a Japanese girl she had sent to a hospital in Nagasaki.

The moon, coming out of its hiding place, for a moment poised clear and
cool in a trough of gray banked by curling clouds of black, sent a
thread of pale light upon the golden dragons on the coat, flashed on the
slippers, and was lost in the darkness under which it darted. Miss
Gibbie, watching, nodded toward it, and tapped the stool on which her
feet rested with the tip of her toes.

"The moon is like one's self," she said. "Go where you will you can't
get rid of it. Spooky thing, a moon. One big eye. Don't like it!"

She lay back in her chair and rested her hands on its arms. From the
garden below the night wind brought soft fragrance of lilacs and
crepe-myrtle, of bleeding-heart and wall-flower, of cow-slips and
candy-tuft, and as they blew in and out, like the touch of unseen
hands, they stirred old memories--made that which was dead, alive
again.

"You're a fool, Gibbie Gault--a fool! You are too old to care as you
care; too old to take up what you've turned your back on all these
years. You are too old--too old!"

Suddenly she sat up. "Too old, am I? I'll see about that! The tail end
of anything isn't its valuable part, and of a life it's usually useless,
but it is all I have left, and I'll be jammed if I don't do something
with it. And were I a man I wouldn't say I'll be jammed. Men have so
many advantages over women!"