Slowly, and with methodical nicety, Walden folded up the letter and put it in his pocket. With a kind of dazed air he looked about him, vaguely surprised that the evening seemed to have fallen so soon. Streaks of the sunset still glowed redly here and there in the sky, but the dense purple of the night had widened steadily over the spaces of the air, and just above the highest bough of the apple- tree on the lawn, the planet Venus twinkled bravely in all its silver panoply of pride as the Evening Star. Low and sweet on the fragrant silence came the dulcet piping of a nightingale, and the soft swishing sound of the river flowing among the rushes, and pushing against the pebbly shore. A sudden smarting sense of pain stung Walden's eyes,--pressing them with one hand he found it wet,-- with tears? No, no!--not with tears,--merely with the moisture of strain and fatigue,--his sight was not so good as it used to be;--of course he was getting old,--and Bishop Brent's small caligraphy had been difficult to decipher by the half-light. All at once something burning and passionate stirred in him,--a wave of chivalrous indignation that poured itself swiftly through every channel of his clean and honest blood, and he involuntarily clenched his hand.
"What liars there are in the world!" he said aloud and fiercely-- "What liars!"
Venus, peeping at him over the apple-boughs, gave out a diamond-like sparkle as though she were no greater thing than a loving eye,--the unseen nightingale, tuning its voice to richer certainties, broke into a fuller, deeper warble,--more stars flew, like shining fire- flies, into space, and on the lowest line of the western horizon a white cloud fringed with silver, floated slowly, the noiseless herald of the coming moon. But Walden saw nothing of the mystically beautiful transfiguration of the evening into night. His thoughts were elsewhere.
"And yet"--he mused sorrowfully--"How do I know? How can I tell? The clear childlike eyes may be trained to deceive,--the smile of the sweet, all too sweet mouth, may be insincere--the pretty, impulsive confiding manner may be a mere trick---and---after all---what is it to me? I demand of myself plainly and fairly--what is it to me?"
He gave a kind of unconscious despairing gesture. Was there some devil in his soul whom he was bound to wrestle with by fasting and prayer, and conquer in the end? Or was it an angel that had entered there, before whose heavenly aspect he must kneel and succumb? Why this new and appalling loneliness which had struck himself and his home-surroundings as with an earthquake shock, shaking the foundations of all that had seemed so safe and secure? Why this feverish restlessness in his mind, which forbade him to occupy himself with any of the work waiting for him to do, and which made him unhappy and ill at ease for no visible or reasonable cause?