This is all in good fun, and yet there is some magic in the trees and the spots of moonlight under their branches, in the quiet and the cold, in the sense Asia has of being on the verge of a pregnant moment. Asia begins to tremble, and she clasps her hands together to hold them still. Charlotte, to her right, gasps suddenly and then falls silent again. Asia’s hair is heavy down her back. She breathes in the clean smell of pine, the dusty smell of the Lombardy poplars. She hears a horse in the lane. The dive of a hawk, the brief interrupted cry of prey. She’s committed to an unmarried life and yet she’s disappointed when no vision appears.

Back at the house, only Charlotte claims to have seen something, a tall indistinct stranger bending towards her. Asia thinks she’s made the whole thing up. “Nothing?” Sleeper asks her, his gaze so intense she can’t meet his eyes.

“Nothing,” she says blithely. “I shall live and die an old maid.”

“Not if I can stop it,” he tells her, but he’s turned away, his cheek as red as if she’d slapped him.

She’s pinned her hair back up and they are gathering the implements necessary for marauding. The moon is gone—there when they needed it, gone when they don’t—and the stars are out, huge and luminous.

Several children from the cabins join them, including Pink Hall, who seems to grow taller every day. He’s holding hands with his little sisters, Nancy and Susanna.

They’re quite a large party. Asia is aware that her days as a Halloween bandit are coming to an end, that all too soon she won’t be able to think of herself as a child. She feels the melancholy of this, and determines to enjoy every moment of this last sortie. The night is extravagantly beautiful, like a hymn or a poem. In those shadowed gullies the sun never touches, a silvery frost overlays the dead leaves.

Asia’s wearing her warmest cloak. Her nose is cold and beginning to run. She has a handkerchief tucked into her muff and uses it with some frequency. Tomorrow, she thinks, my nose will be red as a berry. She has an unexpected thought, that she’d rather Sleeper not see her that way.

Occasionally they pass other groups, all of them bent on errands of mischief. Everyone pretends not to see everyone else. They fall on the neighborhood farms, removing gates, taking down snake fences, making off with carriage wheels, harvesting heads of cabbage and stacking them into pyramids like cannonballs. They come across one of their own horses, loosed and with a cabbage tied to its neck.