* * * * *
When the silence became fixed, Lady Laura for the first time perceived
the rage of wind and rain outside. The very intensity of the interior
stillness and the rapture of attention emphasized to an extraordinary
degree the windy roar without. Yet the silence seemed to her, now as
always, to have a peculiar faculty of detaching the psychical from the
physical atmosphere. In spite of the batter of rain not ten feet away,
the sighing between the shutters, and even the lift now and again of
the heavy curtains in the draught, she seemed to herself as remote
from it as does a man crouching in the dark under some ruin feel
himself at an almost infinite distance from the pick and the hammer of
the rescuers. These were in one world, she in another.
For over an hour no movement was made. She herself sat facing the
fire, Laurie on her left looking towards the cabinet with his back to
the windows, Mrs. Stapleton opposite to her.
An endless procession of thoughts defiled before her as she sat, yet
these too were somewhat remote--far up, so to speak, on the
superficies of consciousness: they did not approach that realm of the
will poised now and attentive on another range of existence.
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