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 part of the house. She walked over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the frontispiece.

“I say I do know you, Katharine,” he affirmed, shutting the book. “It’s only for moments that I go mad.”

“Do you call two whole nights a moment?”

“I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you are. No one has ever known you as I know you. Could you have taken down that book just now if I hadn’t known you?”

“That’s true,” she replied, “but you can’t think how I’m divided—how I’m at my ease with you, and how I’m bewildered. The unreality—the dark—the waiting outside in the wind—yes, when you look at me, not seeing me, and I don’t see you either. But I do see,” she went on quickly, changing her position and frowning again, “heaps of things, only not you.”

“Tell me what you see,” he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

“Impossible,” she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting any part of this into words.

“Try, Katharine,” Ralph urged her.

“But I can’t—I’m talking a sort of nonsense—the sort of nonsense one talks to oneself.” She was dismayed by the expression of longing and despair upon his face. “I was thinking about a mountain in the North of England,” she attempted. “It’s too silly—I won’t go on.”

“We were there together?” he pressed her.