“You saw...?” whispered someone beside me.
It was Julius. His voice startled me. I had forgotten his very presence.
I nodded in reply; no words came to me; there was still a trembling in me, a sense of intolerable yearning, of beauty lost, of power gone beyond recall, of pain and littleness in the place of it.
Julius kept his eyes upon my face, as though waiting for an answer.
“The sun ...” I said in a low and shaking voice.
He bent his head a moment, leaning down upon the window-sill with his face in his hands.
“As we knew it then,” he said with a deep-drawn sigh, raising himself again. “To-day——!”
He pointed. Across the fields I saw the tin roof of the conventicle where we went to church on Sunday, lifting its modern ugliness beyond the playground walls. The contrast was somehow dreadful. A revulsion of feeling rose within me like a storm. I stared at the meagre building beneath whose roof of corrugated iron, once a week, we knelt and groaned that we were “miserable sinners”—begging another to save us from “punishment” because we were too weak to save ourselves. I saw once more in memory the upright-standing throng, claiming with joy the powers of that other Deity of whom they knew they formed a living portion. And again this intolerable yearning swept me. My soul rose up in a passionate protest that vainly sought to express itself in words. Language deserted me; tears dimmed my eyes and blurred my sight; I stretched my hands out straight towards that misty sunrise of To-day....
And, when at length I turned again to speak to Julius, I saw that he had already left my side and gone back to bed.