After dinner we sat round the dining-room fire the drawing-room
might have been under the Shadow for aught we knew talking with
the intimacy of gipsies by the wayside, or of wounded comparing
notes after a skirmish. By eleven o'clock the three between them
had given me every name and detail they could recall that in any
way bore on the house, and what they knew of its history.
We went to bed in a fortifying blaze of electric light. My one
fear was that the blasting gust of depression would return--the
surest way, of course, to bring it. I lay awake till dawn,
breathing quickly and sweating lightly, beneath what De Quincey
inadequately describes as "the oppression of inexpiable guilt."
Now as soon as the lovely day was broken, I fell into the most
terrible of all dreams--that joyous one in which all past evil
has not only been wiped out of our lives, but has never been
committed; and in the very bliss of our assured innocence, before
our loves shriek and change countenance, we wake to the day we
have earned.
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