Warrender, having slipped on his overalls, kindled a lamp and went down to tinker with his engine. Unmusical Armstrong, always accused by Pratt of being "fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils," sauntered, hands in pockets, across the clearing. Elbowing his way through the undergrowth he found, after some fifty or sixty yards, that the vegetation thinned. The lesser shrubs gave way to trees, which grew close together, but with a regularity that suggested planting on a definite plan. Pursuing his way, he came by and by to a more spacious clearing than the one he had quitted; and on the left, in the midst of what had evidently been at one time a small garden, he saw the shell of a two-storeyed cottage. The walls were covered with creepers growing in rank disorder; the windows gaped, empty of glass; the doorless entrance shaped a rectangle of blackness; and bare rafters, shaggy with unpruned ivy, drew parallel lines upon the inky gloom of half the upper storey. Ruins, in daylight merely picturesque, take a new beauty in the cold radiance of the moon, but present at the same time an image of all that is desolate and forlorn. Practical, unemotional as Armstrong was, he thrilled to the impression of vacuity and abandonment, and stood for a while at gaze, as though unwilling to disturb the loneliness.
Presently, however, he stepped lightly across the unmown lawn, and the moss-grown path beyond, and, entering the doorway, struck a match and looked around. From the narrow hall--strewn with fragments of brick and mortar, broken tiles, heaps of plaster, and here and there spotted with fungi--sprang the staircase, whole as to the stairs, but showing gaps in the banisters. Curling strips of torn discoloured paper hung from the walls. The match went out; through the open roof the stars glimmered. Deciding to defer exploration till daylight, lest a tile or brick should fall on his head, or the staircase give way under him, Armstrong turned to go out. As he did so he was aware of a low moaning sound, such as a person inside a house may hear when a high wind soughs under the eaves. It rose and fell in cadences eerily mournful, as though the spirit of solitude itself were lonely and in pain. Armstrong shivered and sought the doorway, and as he felt how gentle was the breeze he met, he wondered at its having power enough to produce such sounds. The moaning ceased; he listened for a moment or two; it did not recur, though the zephyr had not sensibly dropped. Puzzled, he started to retrace his way to the camp. At the farther side of the clearing the melancholy sound once more broke upon his car. Almost involuntarily he wheeled round to look back at the cottage; then, impatient with himself, turned again to quit the scene.