Olver seemed to know these things; he had an untutored insight. Calladine seemed to know them too, but that was less surprising; with his subtle, lyrical mind he might well be expected to apprehend, and apprehending, to drape in wordiness; to give a name; to illuminate blind impulse by giving a name. Poor Calladine; she watched him, detached, as he rambled from discovery to definition, tormenting himself by the beauty of his own phrasing. At moments he viewed them, herself and Lovel, as a spectator, losing himself in the romanticism he wove around them; recalled to the fact that it was his own wife of whom he spoke, he relapsed into the gloom and terror of his pain. For he lived in terror, impotent terror. And Clare watched him, living herself in her hours with Olver and in her consciousness of Lovel. There was the little round mirror she had given to Olver. He always brought it with him; he told her, chuckling, and tapping its bright surface with his finger, that he could see her in it even when she was not present. She did not believe this, but still she half believed it. “Look into it now,” he said, thrusting it under her eyes, “and you will see Nicholas.” She shrank back, afraid; he could not persuade her to look into it, he could not even deride her into looking into it. “You don’t believe me, yet you won’t look,” he said, “but if you don’t believe me, why then won’t you look?” He was for ever daring her to look into it, to find the image of Nicholas. She would not; she did not believe in the magical properties of the mirror, yet nothing would induce her to glance into its queer convexity. “I watched the circus in this, the night Nicholas took you out of the tent,” he said, and she wondered whether he knew how bound to Lovel she had felt herself that night; “I watched Nicholas’ wedding in this; I looked in this at him and Daisy sitting in the kitchen. Look into it now,” he said, offering it to her again: “maybe you’ll see Daisy nursing her baby; maybe you’ll see Nicholas twisting snares; maybe you’ll see him riding up on White Horse Hill, alone, in the snow.” “Do you remember what I told you once?” he said to her another time, “that Nicholas could bring you out to him, even at midnight, if he gave his mind to it?” She wondered how long this strange period would last; she was not even impatient; the core of peace and silence within her lay so certain, so quiet, that she dwelt already as it were serene in the fulfilment of herself and Lovel. Calladine came to her door to find it locked against him. He shook the handle. “Clare! it is I.” A wild winter night; the wind blew along the passage, lifting the loose matting on the floor, the gas-jet on the stair flickered and below the well of the staircase was dark. “Clare!” said Calladine again, shaking the handle. Her voice within answered him, faint, shut away. “Yes, I am here; I am in bed.” She was there! the house contained her at least; she had not fled. “Let me come in, Clare.”