permitted to give it a trial.

"This good friend of yours has offered to try to put it through. He has a plan outlined that he'll tell you of later, that will not only be the best possible influence toward recalling your memory, but will also give you a clean, new start in life. A chance for every success.

"So you needn't return to Walla Walla, Darby. I'm going to parole you—under the charge of your benefactor. Melville, from now on it's up to you."

The little, withered gray man looked very solemn as he rose. The others were stricken instantly solemn too, surprised that the droll smile they were so used to seeing had died on the homely, kindly face. Even his twinkling eyes were sobered too.

Vaguely amused, yet without scorn, McNamara and Forest got up to shake his hand. "I'll look after him," Melville assured them. "Never fear for that."

Slight as he was, wasted by the years, his was a figure of unmistakable dignity as he thanked them, gravely and earnestly, for their kindness in Ben's behalf. Soon after he and his young charge went out together.

III

There was a great house-cleaning in the dome of the heavens one memorable night that flashed like a jewel from the murky desolation of a rainy spring. The little winds came in troops, some from the sea, some with loads of balsam from the great forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and some, quite tired out, from the stretching sage plains to the east, and they swept the sky of clouds as a housekeeper sweeps the ceiling of cobwebs. Not a wisp, not one trailing streamer remained.

The Seattle citizenry, for the first time in some weeks, recalled the existence of the stars. These emerged in legions and armies, all the way from the finest diamond dust to great, white spheres that seemed near enough to reach up and touch. Little forgotten stars that had hidden away since Heaven knows when in the deepest recesses of the skies came out to join in the celebration. Aged men, half blind, beheld so many that they thought their sight was returning to them, and youths saw whole constellations that they had never beheld before. They continued their high revels until a magnificent moon rose in the east, too big and too bright to compete with.

It was not just a crescent moon, about to fade away, or even a rain moon—one of those standing straight up in the sky so that water can run out as out of a dipper. It was almost at its full, large and nearly round, and it made the whole city, which is rather like other cities in the daylight, seem a place of enchantment. It was so bright that the electric signs along Second Avenue were not even counter-attractions.

No living creature who saw it remained wholly unmoved by it. Wary young men, crafty and slick as foxes, found themselves proposing to their sweethearts before they could catch themselves; and maidens who had looked forward to some years yet of independent gaiety found themselves accepting. Old tom-cats went wooing; old spinsters got out old letters; old husbands thought to return and kiss their wives before venturing down to old, moth-eaten clubs. Old dogs, too well-bred to howl, were lost and absent-minded with dreams that were older than all the rest of these things put together.

But to no one in the city was the influence of the moon more potent than to Ben Darby, once known as "Wolf" Darby through certain far-spreading districts, and now newly come from the State capital, walking Seattle's streets with his ward and benefactor, Ezra Melville. No matter how faltering was his memory in other regards, the moon, at least, was an old acquaintance. He had known it in the nights when its light had probed into his barred cell; but his intimate acquaintance with it had begun long, long before that. Not even the names that the alienist, Forest, had spoken—the names of places and people close to his own heart—stirred his memory like the sight of the mysterious sphere rolling through the empty places of the sky. It recalled, clearer than any other one thing, the time and place of his early years.

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.

They paused at last at a crossing, and Ben faced the open fields. Evidently, before crime had claimed him, he had been deeply sensitive to nature's beauty. Ezra saw him straighten, his dark, vivid face rise; his quiet talk died on his lips. Evidently the peaceful scene before him went home to him very straight. He was very near thralldom from some quality of beauty that dwelt here, some strange, deep appeal that the moonlit realm made to his heart.

For the moment Ben had forgotten the old, tried companion at his side. Vague memories stirred him, trying to convey him an urgent message. He could all but hear: the sight of the meadows, ensilvered under the moon, were making many things plain to him which before were shadowed and vague. The steel rails gleamed like platinum, the tree tops seemed to have white, molten metal poured on them. It was hard to take his eyes off those moonlit trees. They got to him, deep inside; thrilling to him, stirring. Perhaps in his Lost Land the moon shone on the trees this same way.

There were no prison walls around him to-night. The high buildings behind him, pressing one upon another, had gone to sustain the feeling of imprisonment, but it had quite left him now. There were no cold, watchful lights,—only the moon and the stars and an occasional mellow gleam from the window of a home. There was scarcely any sound at all; not even a stir—as of prisoners tossing and uneasy in their cells. His whole body felt rested.

The air was marvelously sweet. Clover was likely in blossom in nearby fields. He breathed deep, an unknown delight stealing over him. He stole on farther, into the mystery of the night—ravished, tingling and almost breathless from an inner and inexplicable excitement. Melville walked quietly beside him.

Forest had given over the case: it was Melville's time for experiments to-night. All the way out he had watched his patient, sounding him, studying his reactions and all that he had beheld had gone to strengthen his own convictions. And now, after this moment in the meadows, the old man was ready to go on with his plan.