e far too deeply
moved to sing. She was inundated by a swimming sense of boundaries
nearly transcended, as though she was upon the threshold of a different
life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could only
maintain herself long enough in this shimmering exaltation she would get
right over; things would happen, things that would draw her into that
music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday life again.
There one would walk through music between great candles under eternal
stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. But nothing ever did
happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn ceased, the "Amen"
died away, as if a curtain fell. The congregation subsided. Reluctantly
she would sink back into her seat....

But all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest
attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come
out of church silent and preoccupied, returning unwillingly to the
commonplaces of life....

Sec.3

Ellen met Sir Isaac--in the days before he was Sir Isaac--at the house
of a school friend with whom she was staying at Hythe, and afterwards
her mother and sister came down and joined her for a fortnight at a
Folkstone boarding house. Mr. Harman had caught a chill while inspecting
his North Wales branches and had come down with his mother to
recuperate. He and his mother occupied a suite of rooms in the most
imposing hotel upon the Leas. Ellen's friend's people were partners in a
big flour firm and had a pleasant new aesthetic white and green house of
rough-cast and slates in the pretty country beyond the Hythe golf links,
and Ellen's friend's father was deeply anxious to develop amiable
arrangements with Mr. Harman. There was much tennis, much croquet, much
cycling to the Hythe sea-wall and bathing from little tents and sitting
about in the sunshine, and Mr. Harman had his first automobile with
him--they were still something of a novelty in those days--and was
urgent to take picnic parties to large lonely places on the downs.

There were only two young men in that circle, one was engaged to Ellen's
friend's sister, and the other was bound to a young woman remote in
Italy; neither was strikingly attractive and both regarded Harman with
that awe tempered by undignified furtive derision which wealth and
business capacity so often inspire in the young male. At first he was
quiet and simply looked at her, as it seemed any one might look, the