She wrapped round her a long red woollen cravat and opened the door.
The night in all its fulness met her flatly on the threshold, like the
very brink of an absolute void, or the antemundane Ginnung-Gap believed
in by her Teuton forefathers. For her eyes were fresh from the blaze,
and here there was no street-lamp or lantern to form a kindly
transition between the inner glare and the outer dark. A lingering
wind brought to her ear the creaking sound of two over-crowded branches
in the neighboring wood which were rubbing each other into wounds, and
other vocalized sorrows of the trees, together with the screech of
owls, and the fluttering tumble of some awkward wood-pigeon
ill-balanced on its roosting-bough.

But the pupils of her young eyes soon expanded, and she could see well
enough for her purpose. Taking a bundle of spars under each arm, and
guided by the serrated line of tree-tops against the sky, she went some
hundred yards or more down the lane till she reached a long open shed,
carpeted around with the dead leaves that lay about everywhere. Night,
that strange personality, which within walls brings ominous
introspectiveness and self-distrust, but under the open sky banishes
such subjective anxieties as too trivial for thought, inspired Marty
South with a less perturbed and brisker manner now. She laid the spars
on the ground within the shed and returned for more, going to and fro
till her whole manufactured stock were deposited here.