Charlotte's fair head gleamed out abruptly in the moonlight like a pale flower, but the folds of her mottled purple skirt were as vaguely dark as the foliage on the lilac-bush beside her.

All at once the flowering branches on a wide-spreading apple-tree cut the gloom like great silvery wings of a brooding bird.

The grass in the yard was like a shaggy silver fleece.
Charlotte paid no more attention to it all than to her own breath, or a clock tick which she would have to withdraw from herself to hear.
A low voice, which was scarcely more than a whisper, called her, a slender figure twisted itself around the front corner of the house like a vine.

"Charlotte, you there ?" Charlotte did not hear.

Then the whisper came again.