Listening intently, they heard the swaying of a myriad leaves, the drip of their moisture, the trickle of rivulets that the rain had started again in troughs of summer drought, and, amidst all these, the old man's voice in accents of prayer.
Even in her feverish eagerness to seek Winifred, which had sustained her so long, Sophia chose now to skirt the edge of the wood rather than cross the open.

As they went through long grass and bracken, here and there a fallen log impeded their steps.

A frog, disturbed, leaped before them in the grass; they knew what it was by the sound of its falls.
Soon, in spite of the rustle of their walking, they began to hear the old man's words.
It seemed that he was repeating such passages of Scripture as ascribe the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Whether these were strung together in a prayer, or whether he merely gave them forth to the night air as the poetry on which he fed his soul, they could not tell.

The night was much lighter now than when the storm hung over.