hythm so
tremendous that her own pulses of compassion were no longer felt, or
felt only as the hushed and delicate vibration of the wave. She
recognised her state. It was the blessed state desired as the condition
of the working of the gift.

She turned when the last arch of the beech-trees broke and opened to the
sky at the top of the hill, where the moon hung in immensity, free of
her hill, free of the shrine that held her. She went down with slow
soft footsteps as if she carried herself, her whole fragile being, as a
vessel, a crystal vessel for the holy thing, and was careful lest a
touch of the earth should jar and break her.

CHAPTER FOUR

She went still more gently and with half-shut eyes through her
illuminated house. She turned the lights out in her room and undressed
herself in the darkness. She laid herself on the bed with straight lax
limbs, with arms held apart a little from her body, with eyelids shut
lightly on her eyes; all fleshly contacts were diminished.

It was now as if her being drank at every pore the swimming darkness; as
if the rhythm of her heart and of her breath had ceased in the pulse of
its invasion. She sank in it and was covered with wave upon wave of
darkness. She sank and was upheld; she dissolved and was gathered
together again, a flawless crystal. She was herself the heart of the
charmed circle, poised in the ultimate unspeakable stillness, beyond
death, beyond birth, beyond the movements, the vehemences, the
agitations of the world. She drew Harding Powell into it and held him
there.

To draw him to any purpose she had first to loosen and destroy the
fleshly, sinister image of him that, for the moment of evocation, hung
like a picture on the darkness. In a moment the fleshly image receded,
it sank back into the darkness. His name, Harding Powell, was now the
only earthly sign of him that she suffered to appear. In the third
moment his name was blotted out. And then it was as if she drew him by
intangible, supersensible threads; she touched, with no sense of peril,
his innermost essence; the walls of flesh were down between them; she
had got at him.

And having got at him she held him, a bloodless spirit, a bodiless
essence, in the fount of healing. She said to herself, "He will sleep
now. He will sleep. He will sleep." And as she slid into her own sleep
she held and drew him with her.

He would sleep; he would be all right as long as _she_ slept. Her sleep,
she had