worked, the wonder of her instantaneous well-being
had been the first, the very first hint she had that it was there.

She had never quite recaptured her primal, virgin sense of it; but, to
set against that, she had entered more and more into possession. She
had found out the secret of its working and had controlled it, reduced
it to an almost intelligible method. You could think of it as a current
of transcendent power, hitherto mysteriously inhibited. You made the
connection, having cut off all other currents that interfered, and then
you simply turned it on. In other words, if you could put it into words
at all, you shut your eyes and ears, you closed up the sense of touch,
you made everything dark around you and withdrew into your innermost
self; you burrowed deep into the darkness there till you got beyond it;
you tapped the Power as it were underground at any point you pleased and
turned it on in any direction.

She could turn it on to Harding Powell without any loss to Rodney
Lanyon; for it was immeasurable, inexhaustible.

She looked back at the farm-house with its veiled windows. Formless and
immense, the shadow of Harding Powell swayed uneasily on one of the
yellow blinds. Across the field her own house showed pure and dim
against the darkening slope behind it, showed a washed and watered white
in the liquid, lucid twilight. Her house was open always and on every
side; it flung out its casement arms to the night and to the day. And
now all the lamps were lit, every doorway was a golden shaft, every
window a golden square; the whiteness of its walls quivered and the
blurred edges flowed into the dark of the garden. It was the fragile
shell of a sacred and a burning light.

She did not go in all at once. She crossed the river and went up the
hill through the beech-wood. She walked there every evening in the
darkness, calling her thoughts home to sleep. The Easter moon,
golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long sharp
arch of the beech-trees; it was like going up and up towards a dim
sanctuary where the holiest sat enthroned. A sense of consecration was
upon her. It came, solemn and pure and still, out of the tumult of her
tenderness and pity; but it was too awful for pity and for tenderness;
it aspired like a flame and lost itself in light; it grew like a wave
till it was vaster than any tenderness or any pity. It was as if her
heart rose on the swell of it and was carried away into a r