And that strange intolerable hope was in her face. The mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then. It was the
fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though
badly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannot
explain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for it
remains vivid in me forever--that, for the first time, something almost
happened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressed
towards delivery:

I had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures--not
actual thoughts--of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel--
when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush--as I left the
garden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole
negative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that second
into a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blinding
tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly
behind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing the
frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at
my skirts. I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectives
yet come no nearer to it than this--the conception of a huge assemblage
determined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves. My
legs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath--then turned and
ran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces. At the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut short
the unfinished phrase, I thought the beginning of an awful thing:

"The Damned ..."

Like this it rushed after me from that goblin garden that had sought to
keep me:

"The Damned!" For there was sound in it. I know full well it was subjective, not
actually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it--a great volume,
roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me. The sentence
dipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished. Its
completion was prevented. As usual, nothing happened. But it drove
behind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound of
it I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standing
beside Niagara. They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood,
within it somehow, not audible to all--felt rather than definitely
heard. It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I
flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. It
was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping
wellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers,
red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structure
of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it
home. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had
uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very
moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again. And on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul,
Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea table, looked up to greet me. In
the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watched
me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed
the state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I read
another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel knew. She
had experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awful
sentence I had heard but heard it not for the first time; heard it,
moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end. "Bill, did you hear that curious noise just now?" Frances asked it
sharply before I could say a word. Her manner was confused; she looked
straight at me; and there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide. "There's wind about," I said, "wind in the trees and sweeping round the
walls. It's risen rather suddenly." My voice faltered rather. "No. It wasn't wind," she insisted, with a significance meant for me
alone, but badly hidden. "It was more like distant thunder, we thought. How you ran too!" she added. "What a pace you came across the terraces!" I knew instantly from the way she said it that they both had already
heard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, and
how. My interpretation was what they sought. "It was a curiously deep sound, I admit. It may have been big guns at
sea," I suggested, "forts or cruisers practicing. The coast isn't so
very far, and with the wind in the right direction--"

The expression on Mabel's face stopped me dead. "Like huge doors closing," she said softly in her colorless voice,
"enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamoring to get
out." The gravity, the note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking. Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. "I'm
cold," she had said; "I think I'll get a shawl." Mabel and I were alone. I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I
arrived. She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine. She had made a question of the sentence. "You hear it like that?" I asked innocently. I purposely used the
present tense. She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely
expressionless. My sister's step sounded on the floor of the room behind
us. "If only--" Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out
instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind:

"--something would happen." She instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehow
phrased it wrongly. "We could escape!" She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly. The "we" amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner
struck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dying
woman speaking--a lost and hopeless soul. In that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but I
remember that my sister returned with a grey shawl about her shoulders,
and that Mabel said, in her ordinary voice again, "It is chilly, yes;
let's have tea inside," and that two maids, one of them the grenadier,
speedily carried the loaded trays into the morning-room and put a match
to the logs in the great open fireplace. It was, after all, foolish to
risk the sharp evening air, for dusk was falling steadily, and even the
sunshine of the day just fading could not turn autumn into summer. I was
the last to come in. Just as I left the verandah a large black bird
swooped down in front of me past the pillars; it dropped from overhead,
swerved abruptly to one side as it caught sight of me, and flapped
heavily towards the shrubberies on the left of the terraces, where it
disappeared into the gloom. It flew very low, very close.