Page 170 (1/1)

Once ather her forces; but the will, it appeared, had lost its nervous grasp of the faculties It had no longer that quick grip and coun Passivity rather than activity seeth

Then suddenly and, as it appeared, inevitably, withouther eyes, careless, and indeed unfearing It seemed her one hope And behind the steady movement of her will--sufficient at least to elicit acts of petition--her intellect observed a thousand ihts She perceived the silence of the house and of the breathless spring night outside; she considered Mr Cathcart in the inn across the road, Mrs Baxter upstairs: she contemplated the future as it would be on the morrow--Easter Day, was it not?--the past, and scarcely at all the present She relinquished all plans, all intentions and hopes: she leaned simply upon the supernatural, like a tired child, and looked at pictures

In re it all afterwards, she recalled to herself the fact that this process of prayer seeely tranquil; that there had been in her a consciousness of rest and recuperation as hted house froht The presence of that other in the room was not even an interruption; the nervous force that the other had generated just now seemed harmless and ineffective For a time, at least, that was so But there came a moment when it appeared as if her alan to grip so free clenches itself again upon so

The moment she are of this, she opened her eyes; and saw that the other was looking straight at her intently and questioningly And in that moment she perceived for the first tiht, but in sonorant It was not by word or action, but by so else which she only half understood that she was to struggle

She closed her eyes again with quite a new kind of determination It was not self-command that she needed, but a steady interior concentration of forces

She began again that resolute wordless play of the will--dises of thought--that play of the hich, it seemed, had affected the boy opposite in a neay She had no idea of what the crisis would be, or hoould come She only saw that she had struck upon a new path that led somewhere She must follow it