They felt the Night. It was clear and brittle like a violin: it gave forth notes, sharp, penetrable, woody: it wove its voices into silken strands. It was a dark and glowing violin. The room in which they sat was still of the past of the Inn which had been a Mansion. The ceiling came low: the beds were canopied: chairs, lowboy, brass hearthpieces, rag rug over the black softwood floor, drew into a tight repressed luxuriance, into a single mood, strong, curbed, sufficient, that was New England: ancient New England pregnant of bursting strengths.
Here they sat, thrust close upon each other by the Night and by the moodpent room.
He wanted to take her hand, he did not dare. His eyes searched her retiscence.
“It was a great day, Fanny. We must have walked twenty miles.”
She saw the miles ... miles of trees flaring against their false defeat.—‘We move skyward! Come, Winter, strip us ... still do we move skyward!’ She saw the miles: hours of her small feet beating immortal earth.
“Jonathan,” she spoke at last, “I am going to leave you.”
He hid his face in his hands.
“I have been drugged into peace. Now you want to drug me into happiness.”
“Put it that way if you will.”
“It cannot be.”