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on, and after a moment she did the same.
    "Where to?" he asked.
    She told him she had taken a taxi to the museum and she lived downtown. He drove them slowly out of the lot. They had driven a block south when he was aware of her fidgeting.

    "You're going to think I'm insane," she declared.
    He hastened to assure her. "No, no." In fact he experienced a little more anxiety about what might be coming.
    "Going up to you as I did. I'm restless tonight."
    "I suppose," Bower said, "I am too."
    "I don't think I want to go home."
    "Oh," said Bower.
    "We could drive into the country a bit. To the hills. Or over the bridge."
    "Let's take the bridge."
    Bower had a house on the bay front of the Eastern Shore where he and his wife were planning to spend the weekend. He had not thought to go there, setting out from the museum. Nor even when he suggested the bridge. Now it occurred to him as a wanton possibility.
    They put the lights of the city behind them and drove through icy rain. By the time they were on Route 13 the rain had stopped and the night sky was clearing. A wind from the ocean was driving rain clouds east across the bay to show a slivered late-October moon, unaccountably bright. There were stars.
    "Oh," the woman, Margaret, exclaimed, "horns to the east."
    "Excuse me?"
    "Horns to the east. Haven't you heard it? Don't you know what it means?" Her questions seemed almost urgent. He was perplexed.
    "No."

    She laughed and recited,
Horns to the east,

Soon be increased.

Horns to the west,

Soon be at rest.
    "Don't know?" she asked after a few seconds. "Can't you guess?"
    "I don't think so," Bower said, wondering.
    "Horns to the east," she said, "the waxing moon. Horns to the west, waning moon."
    It took him a moment or two.
    "Ah."
    She mimicked him. "Ah! Ah is right."
    "Did you make it up?" He got no answer. So he observed, "A Halloween moon."
    "Just what I was thinking," she said.
    When they turned off the highway she put an arm across the back of the seat.
    "I wonder," she said playfully, "if we're going somewhere." He glanced at her and in the extraordinary light of the crescent moon saw again the archaic smile. "Where are we going?"
    She, he thought, was the one who wanted to be led. He considered wildly, decided nothing. Then he said, "I have a house near Calverton."
    "Really?"
    "Yes, I do."
    "I see. Could that be where we're going?"
    "If you want to."
    He was encouraged by her silence. Twenty minutes after they had passed through the decorous empty streets of old Chesterfield he pulled over to the shoulder. The road was wooded on both sides and it was possible to make out the POSTED signs on the near tree trunks. Then the persistent storm closed over the moonlit sky and it began to rain hard again.

    "I have to make a call. Do you mind?"
    "Certainly not."
    He called his wife in Roland Park while Margaret sat stiffly beside him, listening equably, it seemed. He had not gotten out to make the call because of the rain. He looked into the dark dripping pine woods—anywhere but at his passenger—and declared to his wife he would be late. Offering no reason. When she asked for one he was reckless, a little unhinged by possibility.
    "I felt out of sorts. I went for a drive in the country."
    His wife asked if he was certain he was all right. He told her that, as far as that went, he was fine. When he turned to Margaret on the car seat beside him, he saw her bent forward, hands across her eyes as if in remorse or simply seeing no evil. He experienced another moment's panic. The wrong woman!
    "Do you," he asked, "do you need to call anyone? I mean, to make a call?"
    She shook her head and said nothing for the remainder of the ride. Shortly, they turned off onto a dirt road and followed its turns and doglegs past a few mailboxes at the head of dark driveways. The houses that showed lights were deep in the woods, far from the roadway. Overhead, the horned moon had appeared again, visible through bare wind-driven