e shut in the streets."

What was it she was repeating?

"Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fear shall be in
the way."

What echo of the past was this?

"And desire shall fail: because--"

Intent, absorbed in retracing the forgotten sequence to its source, she
stood, breathing the thickening incense of the rain; and every breath
was drawing her backward, nearer, nearer to the source of memory. Ah,
the cliff chapel in the rain!--the words of a text mumbled deafly--the
yearly service for those who died at sea! And she, seated there in the
chapel dusk thinking of him who sat beside her, and how he feared a
heavier, stealthier, more secret tide crawling, purring about his feet!

Enfin! Always, always at the end of everything, He! Always, reckoning
step by step, backward through time, He! the source, the inception, the
meaning of all!

Unmoored at last, her spirit swaying, enveloped in memories of him, she
gave herself to the flood--overwhelmed, as tide on tide rose, rushing
over her--body, mind, and soul.

She closed her eyes, leaning there heavily amid the cloudy curtains; she
moved back into the room and stood staring at space through wet lashes.
The hard, dry pulse in her throat hurt her till her under lip, freed
from the tyranny of her small teeth, slipped free, quivering rebellion.

She had been walking her room to and fro, to and fro, for a long time
before she realised that she had moved at all.

And now, impulse held the helm; a blind, unreasoning desire for relief
hurried into action on the wings of impulse.

There was a telephone at her elbow. No need to hunt through lists to
find a number she had known so long by heart--the three figures which
had reiterated themselves so often, monotonously insistent, slyly
persuasive; repeating themselves even in her dreams, so that she
awoke at times shivering with the vision in which she had listened to
temptation, and had called to him across the wilderness of streets and
men.

"Is he at home?"

"--!"

"Would you ask him to come to the telephone?"

"--!"

"Please say to him that it is a--a friend. ... Thank you."

In the throbbing quiet of her room she heard the fingers of the prying
rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very
dull, very far away--or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the
receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds
like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuni