III
HER READING
OUT over Mariveles the sun had set in sombre splendour. A velvet pall of darkness had fallen upon the earth like a conclusion; but the waters of the bay still glowed, glowed with a light that was not reflected, but floated up from within—a luminous exhalation, as it were, from the mysterious depths—a dark purplish light that should not have been, which astonished the soul and was sinister. Someone on the veranda mentioned Morton. The short, idle sentence split the peace of the moment like an electric spark. And the silence that immediately engulfed it was not as the silence that had been before; it was a silence full of unrest, of vague spiritual heavings and stirrings, of tumult invisible, unheard, impalpable and yet felt, poignantly felt, in some immaterial way, as is felt at sea the surge of waters through the impenetrability of the mists. It was such a silence as always followed the invocation of the man; for his case was one which filled us with inward clamour and questioning, and yet pinned us beneath the weight of some indefinable oppression.
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