than he could have believed. She looked out of
the window, sternly determined to forget private misfortunes, to forget
herself, to forget individual lives. With her eyes upon the dark sky,
voices reached her from the room in which she was standing. She heard
them as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to
her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality; it
was as if, lately dead, she heard the living talking. The dream nature
of our life had never been more apparent to her, never had life been
more certainly an affair of four walls, whose objects existed only
within the range of lights and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or
nothing more than darkness. She seemed physically to have stepped beyond
the region where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to
possess, to love, to struggle. And yet her melancholy brought her no
serenity. She still heard the voices within the room. She was still
tormented by desires. She wished to be beyond their range. She wished
inconsistently enough that she could find herself driving rapidly
through the streets; she was even anxious to be with some one who, after
a moment's groping, took a definite shape and solidified into the person
of Mary Datchet. She drew the curtains so that the draperies met in deep
folds in the middle of the window.

"Ah, there she is," said Mr. Hilbery, who was standing swaying affably
from side to side, with his back to the fire. "Come here, Katharine.
I couldn't see where you'd got to--our children," he observed
parenthetically, "have their uses--I want you to go to my study,
Katharine; go to the third shelf on the right-hand side of the door;
take down 'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley'; bring it to me. Then,
Peyton, you will have to admit to the assembled company that you have
been mistaken."

"'Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley.' The third shelf on the right of
the door," Katharine repeated. After all, one does not check children in
their play, or rouse sleepers from their dreams. She passed William and
Cassandra on her way to the door.

"Stop, Katharine," said William, speaking almost as if he were conscious
of her against his will. "Let me go." He rose, after a second's
hesitation, and she understood that it cost him an effort. She knelt
one knee upon the sofa where Cassandra sat, looking down at her cousin's
face, which still moved with the speed of what she had been saying.

"Are you--happy?"