"Oh, my dear, my dear," he said, and smiled into my eyes.
I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me—and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
"Then I have made you a little—a little less unhappy?" I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.
He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into—how can I explain my meaning except by saying—Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and for ever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?
It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.
"Wake, wake!" it called in my ear. "The woman is looking for you. We must go."
My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening's vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.
"Wake!" he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream.