She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark poignant intimacy and merging,—a lifting flood, all come and gone in a timeless moment.
But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself, still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons, grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.
The others faded too. She could recapture nothing more of them. They were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.
Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life, and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never been.
2
Then they came again—straying so suddenly, strangely, briefly across the timeless confusions of adolescence, that they left behind them an even more disturbing sense of their unreality,—an estrangement profounder than before.
It was winter—the time of the long frost and the ten days’ skating,—the time when crossing the river to get to the skating pool was dangerous because of the great blocks of ice coming down with the stream. Those ten days flashed out for ever in life,—a sparkling pure breathless intoxication of movement and light and air that seemed each evening too delightful to be allowed to last; and yet each succeeding morning—she first listening to the day then fearfully peeping at it—had miraculous prolongation. She prayed: Oh God, let the skating last. Let me skate. Take not my happiness from me and I will love Thee as I ought. And for ten days He hearkened unto her.
Each day she abandoned lessons and, crossing the river, ran across the crunching frost-bound marsh to the edge of the pond. Over and over it the people slipped, glided, swirled with shouts of laughter in the sun. Their lips were parted, their eyes shone, they were beautified.
She wore a white sweater and a crimson muffler. At first people looked at her and then they began smiling at her; and soon she was greeting all those who came regularly and smiling at fresh strangers every day.
There was a girl who came each morning from the London train. She was slender and fair, and she skated with the flying grace of a dream. Her pleated skirt swung out as she moved, her feet in their trim boots were narrow and small, and when she twirled her long slim legs showed to the knee. She appeared like a goddess in the midst of the cheerful sociable incompetent herd. Judith skated to and fro in front of her every day, hoping in vain for a look; for she was proud and absorbed and ardent, holding herself aloof and noticing no one, skating and skating till it got dark. One day she brought a handsome young man with her, and to him was not at all proud and indifferent.