Explore "My Lady Rotha" by Stanley J. Weyman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Night is like a lady's riding-mask, which gives to the most familiar features a strange and uncanny aspect. When to night are added silence and alarm, and that worst burden of all, responsibility -- responsibility where a broken twig may mean a shot, and a rolling stone capture, where in a moment the evil is done -- then you have a scene and a time to try the stoutest.
To walk boldly into a wall of darkness, relying on daylight knowledge, which says there is no wall; to step over the precipice on the faith of its depth being shadow -- this demands nerve in those who are not used to the vagaries of night. But when the darkness may at any instant belch forth a sheet of flame; when every bush may hide a cowardly foe and every turn a pitfall, and there are women in company and helpless children, then a man had need to be an old soldier or forest-born, if he would keep his head cool, and tell one horse from another by the sound of its hoofs.