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Monica—while the question fell, like a plummet, down, far down, into her heart.—‘And we discover, as we grow old, that we never grow up;’—and she seemed to listen to its fall and to watch it. It fell beyond thought, towards the unfathomable foundations of the cliff. She watched it disappear. Her mind could give her nothing. But he was asking nothing of her mind.

The memory of the wide golden sunset that she had watched with Hester rose within her now as, leaning her head on her hand, she kept silence. Had he asked that question this morning she could have answered him only in the terms of the nightmare vision; of hallucinated life and obliterating death. What had happened to her since then? It had been as if she had left life and death behind her and as if—she watched the sunset broadening salvation had been made manifest. Not the saving from death; it was deeper than that withdrawal back into existence; the saving from darkness and alienation. It had been given. She could have done nothing by herself. It had come to her and widened before her like the sunset. And could salvation, manifested here and now to the darkened selves, fail to express its essential being for ever and to include all grief in its atoning beatitude?