Olva turned very slowly and entered his black stairway.
In his heart he was crying, "How long can I stand this? Another day? Another hour? This loneliness. . . . I must break it. I must tell some one. I must tell some one."
As he entered his room he thought that he saw against the farther wall an old gilt mirror and in the light of it a dark figure facing him; a voice, heavy with some great overburdening sorrow, spoke to him.
"How terrible a thing it is to be alone with God!"
CHAPTER IX — REVELATION OF BUNNING (II)
1
The next day the frost broke, and after a practice game on the Saul's ground, in preparation for a rugby match at the end of the week, Olva, bathed and feeling physically a fine, overwhelming fitness, went to see Margaret Craven.
This sense of his physical well-being was extraordinary. Mentally he was nearly beaten, almost at the limit of his endurance. Spiritually the catastrophe hovered more closely above him at every advancing moment, but, physically, he had never, in all his life before, felt such magnificent health. He had been sleeping badly now for weeks. He had been eating very little, but he felt no weariness, no faintness. It was as though his body were urging upon him the importance of his resistance, as though he were perceiving, too, with unmistakable clearness the cleavage that there was between body and soul. And indeed this vigour did give him an energy to set about the numberless things that he had arranged to fill every moment of his day—the many little tinkling bells that he had set going to hide the urgent whisper of that other voice. He carried his day through with a rush, a whirl, so that he might be in bed again at night almost before he had finished his dressing in the morning—no pause, no opportunity for silence. . . .