the open drawing-room door. It was long since she had seen the room empty. His absence had restored it to her in its old shadowy character; deep black shadows, and spaces of faint blue light that came in through the lace curtains, painting their patterned mesh on the sheen of the opposite walls. The old familiar presence was there in the hush of the night, dissolving the echoes of the day and promising, if she stayed long enough within it, the emergence of tomorrow, a picture, with long perspectives, seen suddenly in the distance, alone upon a bare wall. She stood still, moving rapidly into the neutral zone between the two days, further and further into the spaces of the darkness, until everything disappeared, and all days were far-off strident irrelevances, forever unable to come between her and the sound of the stillness and its touch, a cool breath, passing through her unimpeded.
She could not remember whether she had first seen him rise or heard the deep tones coming out of the velvety darkness.
“No, you did not startle me. I’ve been to a lecture,” she said sinking in a sleep-like stupor into a chair drawn up beyond the light of the window, opposite his own, across which there struck a shaft of light falling, now that he was again seated, only on his face. Miriam gazed at him from within the sheltering darkness, fumbling sleepily for the way back to some lucid recovery of the event of her evening.
“Ah. It is a pity I could not be there.” His words broke into the stillness, an immensity of communication, thrown forward through their unrestricted sitting, in the darkness, where, to bridge, before tomorrow, the gap made by his evening’s absence, he had waited for her. She sat silent, her days once more wound closely about her, an endless hospitable chain.
“Tell me of this lecture.”
“Philosophy.”