She dipped away. She vanished, her
fading eyes turned to the last towards some savior who had failed her.
And that strange intolerable hope was in her face.
The mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then. It was the
fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though
badly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannot
explain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for it
remains vivid in me forever--that, for the first time, something almost
happened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressed
towards delivery:
I had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures--not
actual thoughts--of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel--
when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush--as I left the
garden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole
negative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that second
into a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blinding
tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly
behind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing the
frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at
my skirts.
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