TIME   PASSES
darkened the pool in which light reflected itself;
or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly
across the bedroom floor.
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together
made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from
which life had parted; solitary like a pool at
evening, far distant, seen from a train window,
vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the
evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though
once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands
in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs
and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind,
and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing,
snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions
—" Will you fade? Will you perish? "—scarcely
disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of
pure integrity, as if the question they asked
scarcely needed that they should answer: we
remain.
Nothing it seemed could break that image,
corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying
mantle of silence which, week after week, in the
empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of
birds, ships hooting, the drone and hum of the
fields, a dog's bark, a man's shout, and folded
them round the house in silence. Once only a
board sprang on the landing; once in the middle
of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after
201