To me at least, making my statement
here with a deliberation with which I have never made it,
the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if,
while I took in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene
had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write,
the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped.
The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly
hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no
other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I
saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky,
the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over
the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame.
That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,
of each person that he might have been and that he was not.
We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me
to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few
instants more became intense.
The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know,
with regard to certain matters, the question of how long
they have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you
will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities,
none of which made a difference for the better, that I could see,
in there having been in the house--and for how long, above all?--
a person of whom I was in ignorance.
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