"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."
"Does it seem strange?" she asked.
"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no bird.
When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to accept that though now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she was not.
"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"
But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed the gate upon him.
It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought, without his will, would share itself. All this is a new way of consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had previously been competent to support life.
Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home, what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.
And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along, learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.
So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon the air as lightly as if strong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up, and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.