The twisting downward path was speckled with pale patches of moonlight. A stone cast a sharp shadow. She could see leaf shadows printed on the path. Overhead the night was so deeply blue that she refused to believe it; she was reminded of the fraudulent and enchanting skies of night scenes in old Technicolor movies. A nearby crackle startled her. She had read that there were possums, raccoons, and deer in the woods. Judith had never seen a possum. What if one leaped out at her? She wouldn’t even know what it was.

When she reached the bench at the bend of the path she stopped in surprise. It had no color, though the moon shone on part of it—it was only darkness and light. There, where she had been peaceful, she sat down.

On the brilliantly moonlit cliff the gazebo cast a hard-edged shadow. There were many parallel stripes and criss-crosses. Through the pale, radiant beams of the gazebo she could see diamonds and parallelograms of dark blue night. Near the pointed roof-shadow something gleamed, and she recognized the beer can. It threw a long shadow. At the very edge of the cliff, brightness turned into darkness. She tried to see the precise place where the brightness stopped.

She raised a hand to her face and was startled to feel wetness there. She remembered that she had been crying. The woman had hurt her. And at the memory it began again: something rose in her and she was shaken with it, she wept and bent her face into her hands. She took deep breaths, as if she had to reach far down to find strength for her sorrow. Her body shook, her ribs ached, her shoulders hunched old-womanishly.

She could not stop. She wept as if some deep restraint of pride or breeding had given way in her. She wept beyond shame, crudely and obscenely, as if grief were a form of ugliness she could no longer escape. She had no sympathy for the grief that filled her and shook her, that seemed too large for her, as if it did not fit her insides correctly. Her grief was the wrong size. It spilled out of her and left her far behind. It was larger than the Mountain Lodge, larger than anything; and it seemed to her that she had left her room and come out into the night because only the night was large enough.