I had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures--not actual thoughts--of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel--when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush--as I left the garden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole negative and suppressed agony that _was_ the Place, focused that second into a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blinding tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly behind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing the frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at my skirts. I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectives yet come no nearer to it than this--the conception of a huge assemblage determined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves. My legs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath--then turned and ran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces. At the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut short the unfinished phrase, I _thought_ the beginning of an awful thing: ‘The Damned ...’ Like this it rushed after me from that goblin garden that had sought to keep me: ‘The Damned!’ For there was sound in it. I know full well it was subjective, not actually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it--a great volume, roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me. The sentence dipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished. Its completion was prevented. As usual, nothing happened. But it drove behind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound of it I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standing beside Niagara. They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood, within it somehow, not audible to all--felt rather than definitely heard. It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. It was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping wellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers, red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structure of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it home. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again.