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which had preceded him to town. He became a recluse, refused to see callers or to answers letters, leaving it to Elizabeth, who sometimes acted as his secretary, to amass a pile of correspondence and send out replies at intervals. He introduced curious variations of his own into the ceremonial of his services and even into the liturgy. He began a sermon by saying, “And what if I tell you that there is no God?” and then left his congregation to fidget uneasily during a long silence. He once conducted a service from behind the altar. He was given to laughing in church.
     
    These manifestations frightened rather than embarrassed Pattie. As Carel was endowed for her with an ineradicable grace she could not see his antics as other than somehow natural. Yet she felt frightened of something which was happening in his mind. What she could only express as his dryness appalled her. Amid all his oddity he remained a cool, temperate even circumspect person. He had, she thought, no excesses except the great one, and what that was she could not name. More simply she supposed that Carel was losing his faith. Pattie did not therefore lose hers; but it became for her more of a talisman than a simple fact. Her universe had altered and was altering. “Life has no outside,” she said to herself one day, scarcely knowing what she meant. Her morning prayer on waking, her prayer that eased that nightly load of horror, became something vaguer and more formal. The Precious Blood had lost some of its magic power, and Pattie no longer felt on easy personal terms with God, although a veiled figure still towered to call the lapsed soul.
     
    Occasionally now she thought about leaving Carel; but the thought was like a prisoner’s dream of becoming a bird and flying over the wall. Love and passion and guilt had wrapped her round and round, and she lay inert like a chrysalis, moving a little but incapable of changing her place. She was very unhappy. She worried interminably about Carel and the feud with the two girls poisoned her existence. Yet she did not conceive of leaving Carel for an ordinary life elsewhere, and although she was sometimes conscious of an acute clear wish to be the mother of children she did not really picture another world where she might love in innocence. She felt she was irrevocably soiled and broken and unfitted now for ordinary life. In past days someone like her would have found refuge in a nunnery. She sometimes tried imagine some modern equivalent. She would go far away and dedicate herself to the service of humanity and be Patricia for ever and ever after, Sister Patricia, perhaps Saint Patricia. She read the newspapers and represented to herself the vast sea of human misery. With this she associated a vision of herself, purified and unworldly, ministering to the wretched, an anonymous and yet oddly mysterious figure. Sometimes she even thought of herself as being nobly martyred, eaten perhaps by black men in the Congo.
     
    Pattie really knew the falseness of this dream. She knew it as with the passing of time she realized that her bond with Carel was now stronger than ever. She was not left to herself. The physical connection between them still cobwebbed the house with its electric silk. Carel who had once danced with her, danced alone now to the Swan music, a shadowy figure moving in the darkness of his room, whose door for some protection he usually left a little open; but she felt sure that he danced for her, that he was her, dancing. She was aware of him and he was aware of her. By other means she was his mistress still. And Carel seemed to need her more than before. They did not talk a great deal, but they had never talked a great deal. They existed together in a constant sort of animal communion of looks and touches and presences and half-presences.
     
    It was in this closeness that Pattie apprehended at last something like a great fear in Carel, a fear which afflicted her with terror and with a kind of nausea.