"His darkness is worse than mine," said the girl. "This is a ring, on his hand…" She had laid her hand a moment on the man's, in pity or as if asking his unconscious pardon for her eavesdropping on his dreams.

"Yes, a gold ring without marking or design. It was all he wore on his body. And his mind stripped naked as his flesh. So the poor brute comes to us out of the forest—sent by whom?"

All the family of Zove's House except the little children gathered that night in the great hall downstairs, where high windows stood open to the moist night air. Starlight and the presence of trees and the sound of the brook all entered into the dimly lit room, so that between each person and the next, and between the words they said, there was a certain space for shadows, night-wind, and silence.

"Truth, as ever, avoids the Stranger," the Master of the House said to them in his deep voice. "This stranger brings us a choice of several unlikelihoods. He may be an idiot born, who blundered here by chance; but then, who lost him? He may be a man whose brain has been damaged by accident, or tampered with by intent. Or he may be a Shing masking his mind behind a seeming amentia. Or he may be neither man nor Shing; but then, what is he? There's no proof or disproof for any of these notions. What shall we do with him?"

"See if he can be taught," said Zove's wife Rossa.

The Master's eldest son Metock spoke: "If he can be taught, then he is to be distrusted. He may have been sent here to be taught, to learn our ways, insights, secrets. The cat brought up by the kindly mice."

"I am not a kindly mouse, my son," the Master said. "Then you think him a Shing?"

"Or their tool."

"We're all tools of the Shing. What would you do with him?"

"Kill him before he wakes."

The wind blew faintly, a whippoorwill called out in the humid, starlit Clearing.