Mabel laid the tube on the table and stood up. She was completely herself now. “Give me a kiss, sister,” she said. The nurse nodded and smiled to her once more at the door. But Mabel hardly noticed it; again she was looking towards the window. “I shall come back in half-an-hour,” said Sister Anne. Then her eyes caught a square of white upon the centre table. “Ah! that letter!” she said. “Yes,” said the girl absently. “Please take it.” The nurse took it up, glanced at the address, and again at Mabel. Still she hesitated. “In half-an-hour,” she repeated. “There is no hurry at all. It doesn’t take five minutes.... Good-bye, my dear.” But Mabel was still looking out of the window, and made no answer. III Mabel stood perfectly still until she heard the locking of the door and the withdrawal of the key. Then once more she went to the window and clasped the sill. From where she stood there was visible to her first the courtyard beneath, with its lawn in the centre, and a couple of trees growing there--all plain in the brilliant light that now streamed from her window, and secondly, above the roofs, a tremendous pall of ruddy black. It was the more terrible from the contrast. Earth, it seemed, was capable of light; heaven had failed. It appeared, too, that there was a curious stillness. The house was, usually, quiet enough at this hour: the inhabitants of that place were in no mood for bustle: but now it was more than quiet; it was deathly still: it was such a hush as precedes the sudden crash of the sky’s artillery. But the moments went by, and there was no such crash: only once again there sounded a solemn rolling, as of some great wain far away; stupendously impressive, for with it to the girl’s ears there seemed mingled a murmur of innumerable voices, ghostly crying and applause. Then again the hush settled down like wool. She had begun to understand now. The darkness and the sounds were not for all eyes and ears. The nurse had seen and heard nothing extraordinary, and the rest of the world of men saw and heard nothing. To them it was no more than the hint of a coming storm. Mabel did not attempt to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. It was nothing to her as to whether the sights and sounds were generated by her own brain or perceived by some faculty hitherto unknown. She seemed to herself to be standing already apart from the world which she had known; it was receding from her, or, rather, while standing where it had always done, it was melting, transforming itself, passing to some other mode of existence. The strangeness seemed no more strange than anything else than that ... that little painted box upon the table. Then, hardly knowing what she said, looking steadily upon that appalling sky, she began to speak.... “O God!” she said. “If You are really there really there---”