shed all plans, all intentions and hopes: she
leaned simply upon the supernatural, like a tired child, and looked at
pictures.

* * * * *

In remembering it all afterwards, she recalled to herself the fact
that this process of prayer seemed strangely tranquil; that there had
been in her a consciousness of rest and recuperation as marked as that
which a traveler feels who turns into a lighted house from a stormy
night. The presence of that other in the room was not even an
interruption; the nervous force that the other had generated just now
seemed harmless and ineffective. For a time, at least, that was so.
But there came a moment when it appeared as if her almost mechanical
and rhythmical action of internal effort began to grip something. It
was as when an engine after running free clenches itself again upon
some wheel or cog.

The moment she was aware of this, she opened her eyes; and saw that
the other was looking straight at her intently and questioningly. And
in that moment she perceived for the first time that her conflict lay,
not externally, as she had thought, but in some interior region of
which she was wholly ignorant. It was not by word or action, but by
something else which she only half understood that she was to
struggle....

She closed her eyes again with quite a new kind of determination. It
was not self-command that she needed, but a steady interior
concentration of forces.

She began again that resolute wordless play of the will--dismissing
with a series of efforts the intellectual images of thought--that play
of the will which, it seemed, had affected the boy opposite in a new
way. She had no idea of what the crisis would be, or how it would
come. She only saw that she had struck upon a new path that led
somewhere. She must follow it.

Some little sound roused her; she opened her eyes and looked up.

He had shifted his position, and for a moment her heart leapt with
hope. For he sat now leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and his
head in his hands, and in the shaded lamplight it seemed that he was
shaking.

She too moved, and the rustle of her dress seemed to reach him. He
glanced up, and before he dropped his head again she caught a clear
sight of his face. He was laughing, silently and overpoweringly,
without a sound....

For a moment the nausea seized her so fiercely that she gasped,
catching at her throat; and she stared at that bowed head and sha