‘At death’s door,’ murmured Lawford under his breath; ‘who was it was saying that? Have you ever, Sheila, in a dream, or just as one’s thoughts go sometimes, seen that door?...its ruinous stone lintel carved into lichenous stone heads...stonily silent in the last thin sunlight, hanging in peace unlatched. Heated, hunted, in agony—in that cold, green-clad shadowed porch is haven and sanctuary....But beyond—O God, beyond!’ Sheila stood listening with startled eyes. ‘And was all that in Quain?’ she inquired rather flutteringly. Lawford turned a sidelong head, and looked steadily at his wife. She shook herself, with a slight shiver. ‘Very well, then,’ she said and paused in the silence. Her husband yawned, and smiled, and almost as if lit with that thin last sunshine seemed the smile that passed for an instant across the reverie of his shadowy face. He drew a hand wearily over his eyes. ‘What has he been saying now?’ he inquired like a fretful child. Sheila stood very quiet and still, as if in fear of scaring some rare, wild, timid creature by the least stir. ‘Who?’ she merely breathed. Lawford paused on the hearth-rug with his comb in his hand. ‘It’s just the last rags of that beastly influenza,’ he said, and began vigorously combing his hair. And yet, simple and frank though the action was, it moved Sheila, perhaps, more than any other of the congested occurrences of the last few days. Her forehead grew suddenly cold, the palms of her hands began to ache, she had to hasten out of the room to avoid revealing the sheer physical repulsion she had experienced. But Lawford, quite unmindful of the shock, continued in a kind of heedless reverie to watch, as he combed, the still visionary thoughts that passed in tranced stillness before his eyes. He longed beyond measure for freedom that until yesterday he had not even dreamed existed outside the covers of some old impossible romance—the magic of the darkening sky, the invisible flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the ‘change’ quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him.