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Moonbeam Alley (Die Mondscheingasse) is narrated by a traveler stranded overnight in an unnamed port town after missing his ship's departure. Restless and unable to sleep, he wanders into the town's seedier back streets and, through a lit window, witnesses a strange, tense reunion between a woman and a man who seems to be her husband, returned after a long absence.

Piecing together fragments of what he overhears and observes, the narrator gradually understands that the woman has been reduced to prostitution in the alley during her husband's absence, and that his return reopens a wound neither of them can articulate directly. The encounter plays out with an oppressive, feverish intensity typical of Zweig's shorter, more grotesque novellas — closer to nightmare than to his more measured psychological studies.

Written earlier in Zweig's career, Moonbeam Alley is one of his darkest and least resolved stories, ending without the clean psychological insight that closes many of his other novellas — the narrator, and the reader, are left with an image rather than an explanation.