Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/206

 'How very queer!' he thought, referring to the wire netting. 'She must have lifted it and wriggled under⁠ ⁠… !'

Wondering how in the world she managed it, what in the world had possessed him to be so free with her, and who in the world she was, he went up the steep slope to the post office and so to bed, her promise to come again another night still ringing delightfully in his ears. And curious were the thoughts and sensations that accompanied him. Most of all, perhaps, was the half suggestion of some dim memory that he had known this girl before, had met her somewhere, more⁠—that she knew him. For in her voice⁠—a low, soft, windy little voice it was, tender and soothing for all its quiet coldness⁠—there lay some faint reminder of two others he had known, both long since gone: the voice of the woman he had loved, and⁠—the voice of his mother.

But this time through his dreams there ran no clash of battle. He was conscious, rather, of something cold and clinging that made him think of sifting snowflakes climbing slowly with entangling touch and thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind⁠—cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ten million feathery touches.