He was curiously peremptory, almost imperious.
She did not answer him—threading her needle deliberately against the light.
Suddenly doors flung wide, and his whole being leapt forth as from a furnace, caught her up, and rapt her in a living flame of love.
She seemed to feel it beating about her, devouring her, and stirred as a tired bird stirs in its nest at night after a long flight.
Ernie was trembling till it seemed to him that his heels rat-a-tatting on the floor must betray him.
Then he went on his way.
The transfiguring experience that comes perhaps once in a life-time to the pure in heart had come to him in full flood. A new life was his, sweeping away old land-marks, and bearing him he knew not whither. He drifted with that mighty tide, content to be borne along. He had been alive for twenty-five years, yet dead. Now he rose from the tomb, at this his astounding Ascension-tide. In a second he had been rapt up from the earth, had suffered miraculous conversion, and would never again see life as he had once seen it.
It was curious, wonderful, and above all it revolutionized old values.
The men and women he met in the passage looked different, especially the women.
They were coarse, commonplace.