A low song wavered up from the Green. It climbed three plaintive notes of the scale and sank again in a hesitant and wistful cadence.

  Nell raised her head and turned it toward the window. So strange a sound there in the solitude - so pure and musical the tone - Was it real? Was she imagining it? Was it the voice of the singer of songs, the dreamer - wanderer - within her own heart? But it seemed to come from the window-

  She slipped out of bed and ran to the window and searched the scene of enchantment below her, the napkin of brilliant silver spread before the terrace, the inky shadows thrown upon it by the spikes of the pines on the cliff opposite, the bulk of the stone fountain. One shadow seemed to move - a shadow shaped like a tiny bear walking on hind legs. It was a porcupine. It came slowly from the lower edge of the Green to the upper, moving parallel to the terrace, and from it came the soft moaning song, the rare song of the porcupine, a sound as innocent and unconscious as the voice of a very young child, murmuring itself into sleep. It walked along upright, very slowly, singing to the moon.

  Nell clasped her hands in artless joy. She had never heard it before.

  And now between her face and the dark cliff opposite, there was something in the air, glittering. Under the clear starry sky this had drifted in, filling the space above the Green. It was falling out of a blue nothingness. The moonlight shining through it made it a rain of diamonds. Snow. The first snow!