The house affected her in the same way. Its tranquillity, its dignity, its rapt air of hiding secrets mystic as the Grail, impressed her as the attributes of a living thing, with a mind and being larger than her own. Its susceptibility, too, amazed her. Halsted, for instance, had cared nothing for weather. When the sun burned, you drew the blinds, and, within, the luxury grew cool and fragrant; and when storm held sway without, again the blinds were drawn, shutting you into soft comfort, where electric light, silver, and china, laughter and the click of balls or the slur of dancing feet, struck always the same note of lapped pleasure. But, at Watters, when the sun shone, the old house stirred dreamily and smiled, and half-forgotten pictured faces looked alive from the dim walls, and threads of hot gold ran molten along the dark floors. There was no need to curtain the sun; the place needed it, and turned its old bones gratefully under its touch. And on days of stress the house shared it with the day; you could not shut the storm from Watters. The wind was in the house itself, lifting the rugs, whistling up the stair, crying like a lost soul in the eaves. The hurrying sky was mirrored in the glass of the panelling, and the beating rain filled the stone eyes with streaming tears. Outside, the full river swung above its banks, and the lost wail of sheep on the mist-hung fell rode on the tortured air. But the silence was worse than anything, she found,--the real silence that is full of notes but never a note that jars. When she woke in the morning, it took her by the throat. No jangling of trams, mill-whistles, and trains; only, at times, faint music from the farm across the way, and the slow, sleepy call of church-bells. She could not lie, as she learned to do in later days, staring with quiet eyes at the sky, wrapped in a happy stillness more soothing than sleep. It often woke her in the night--that full silence.