buried alive.

"It is a horror," he remarked, "that we generally find in the very old,
and seldom in the young." They both expressed their interest in what he
told them; it seemed to them very strange. Another strange thing about
the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was
late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked
strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her appearance,
however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm
of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she
talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them
naked on her knee. She assured them over and over again that it was
their duty to eat.

The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they
expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut it
again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she stopped
as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her. She stood for
a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful beauty
of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him now--as
something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about afterwards.
They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to be suspended
or forgotten.

Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley paced
up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a subdued
but suddenly sonorous voice. Fragments of the poem were wafted in at the
open window as he passed and repassed.

Peor and Baalim
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice batter'd God of Palestine
And mooned Astaroth--

The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young
men, but they had to be borne. As the evening drew on and the red
light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of
desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the
day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance
of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a
repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.
Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey. She explained that Maria, in
opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she
had bound it up; it was unfortu