he sense of its ancient beauty.

So they went over the town together, and she showed him what she
considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her
forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her
mother's family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where
several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score.
She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he
understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing
his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood
revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed
very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world's history. Her
voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept
deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep,
allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its
elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being
became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir
in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it
might lift altogether....

He began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was
reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self
became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and
vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of
it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with
new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through
the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly
coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful
and seductive.

And only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in
itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child's
face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a
column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a
picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called
her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the
heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise,
her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the
wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not
understood a single word, except that the fire apparently fr