Now it had entered her, and lay, heavy as pitch, upon the
very springs of her interior life. It was terror of something to come.
That which it heralded was not yet come: but it was approaching.
The third symptom was the approach itself--swift and silent, like the
running of a bear; so swift that it was upon her through the dark
before she could stir or act. It came upon her, in a flash at the
last; and she understood the whole secret.
It is possible only to describe it as, afterwards, she described it
herself. The powerlessness and the terror were no more than the
far-off effect of its approach; the Thing itself was the center.
Of that realm of being from which it came she had no previous
conception: she had known evil only in its effects--in sins of herself
and others--known it as a man passing through a hospital ward sees
flushed or pale faces, or bandaged wounds. Now she caught some glimpse
of its essence, in the atmosphere of this bear-like thing that was
upon her. As aches and pains are to Death, so were sins to this
Personality--symptoms, premonitions, causes, but not Itself. And she
was aware that the Thing had come from a spiritual distance so
unthinkable and immeasurable, that the very word distance meant
little.
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