Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/104

96 a sense of fear, of a rising anxiety, an increasing terror. When, after a lull, the storm burst into sudden fury again, she started violently, as she had started when Brauws' hand rang the bell. ..

With each shriller howl of the raging storm she started; and each fresh alarm left her so nervous and so strangely despondent that she could not understand herself. ..

"Does that sort of thing really exist then?" she asked herself for the third time.

And the question seemed each time to echo through her soul like a refrain. She could never have thought, suspected or imagined that such things really existed. She did not remember ever reading about them or ever talking to anybody about them. It had never been her nature to attach much importance to the strange coincidences of life, because they had never harmonized in her life with those of other lives; at least, she did not know about them, did not remember them. . . For a moment, it flashed through her mind that she had walked as the blind walk, all her life, in a pitch-dark night. . . and that to-day suddenly a light had shone out before her and a ruddy glow had filtered through her closed eyelids.

"No," she thought, "in those things I have always been very much of a woman; and I have never thought about them. If by chance I ever heard about them, they did not attract me. Then why do