There was a silence, filled with still, breathless cold; with enormous space, with infinity.

Marise felt a rigorous shudder run over her, as though something vital were coming to her, like the rending pang of pain which heralds child-birth.  After this, did she close her eyes for a moment, or did it come to her while she continued to gaze wide-eyed at the stern greatness of the universe?  What was this old, familiar, unknown sensation?

. . . as though, on a long journey in the dark it had grown light, so that she had suddenly recognized which way she was going.

Then she knew what it was.  Conscious and awake, she was feeling herself one with the great current, advancing with an irresistible might, majesty and power, in which she shared, to which she gave her part.

VI

January.

She was putting away the clean sheets from the washing on the shelves at the end of the hall, upstairs, her mind entirely on the prosaic task, wondering when she would have to replace some of the older ones, and wishing she could put off buying till the outrageous post-war prices went down.  Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to see who was there.  It was Neale, come in early.  He was standing, looking at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that was there.

A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her.  She felt a sudden intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly, her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.

“Oh, Neale!” she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him.  He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and opening his arms he drew her into them.  The ineffable memory of all the priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in their kiss.

That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take down the Largo in the Chopin sonata.  As she began it, something stirred in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of the music.  How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a hundred echoes and overtones!

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you.  It was only the lower pleasures of which one grew tired,—­had enough.  The others grew with your growing capacity to hold them.  She remembered how that day she had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, “A beauteous evening, calm and free,” and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple’s inner shrine, that you adored none the less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration like the nun:  because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home there.