Page:Twilight of the Souls (1917).djvu/177

Rh more. . . because the circles had shifted so very far apart? . . . The twilight was gathering around them all, sombre and menacing; and he felt its chilling influence even now as he rode along on that warm summer's day: the twilight was deepening around Dorine and around Paul, growing darker and darker with their growing loneliness, the loneliness of a lonely man and a lonely woman who had not sought or had not found the warm light for their later years, the still young but yet later years of the small soul that just exists and, consciously or unconsciously, is for ever asking itself the reason of its small existence. . . . The twilight was perhaps not yet so dark around Adolphine, for she still had her own circle; but even that circle had already shifted far from the original family-circle, was moving farther and farther away. . . . And the twilight had fallen, black as night, so suddenly, around poor Bertha, now that she was dozing away in a small house in a village where she knew nobody and did nothing but look out of her window at the garden, while the roar of the trains deadened her already dull memories. It seemed too as if Bertha's circle had broken up, like a ring of light that breaks up into sparks which die out in the distance, now that she had no one with her but Marianne, poor girl, pining away in her unhappy lot, the victim of a destiny too big for her small soul. . . . Karel, his brother: was Karel his brother still? Or had