Chapter 5 - Page 2

It seems as if there were only--people."

The very sound of her voice thrilled him--everything about her thrilled
him--the very stuff her plain frock was made of, the small hat she wore,
her way of moving or quiet sitting down near him, but most of all the
lift of her eyes to his--because there was no change in it and the eyes
expressed what they had expressed when they had first looked at him. It
was a thing which moved him to-day exactly as it had moved him when he
was too young to explain its meaning and appeal. It was the lovely faith
and yearning acceptance of him as a being whose perfection could not be
questioned. There was in it no conscious beguiling flattery or
appraisement--it was pure acceptance and sweet waiting for what he had
to give. He sometimes found himself trembling with his sense of its
simple unearthliness.

Few indeed were the people who at this time were wholly normal. The
whole world seemed a great musical instrument, overstrung and giving out
previously unknown harmonies and inharmonies. Amid the thunders of great
crashing discords the individual note was almost unheard--but the
individual note continued its vibrations.

The tone which expressed Donal Muir--in common with many others of his
age and sex--was a novel and abnormal one. His being no longer sang the
healthy human song of mere joy in life and living. A knowledge of
cruelty and brutal force, of helplessness and despair, grew in him day
by day. Causes for gay good cheer and laughter were swept away, leaving
in their places black facts and needs to gaze at with hard eyes.

"Do you see how everything has _stopped_--how nothing can go on?" he
said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we
used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with--dancing and tennis and
polo and theatres and parties--how jolly and all right they were in
their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand
talk of them! There is only one thing."

The blue of his eyes grew dark.

"It is as if a gigantic wall were piling itself up between us and Life,"
he went on. "That is how I see it--a wall piling itself higher every
hour. It's built of dead things and maimed and tortured ones. It's
building itself of things you can't speak of. It stands between all the
world and living--mere living. We can't go on till we've stormed it and
beaten it down--or added our bodies to it. If it isn't beaten down it
will rise to heaven itself and shut it out--and that will be the end of
the world." He shook his head in sudden defiant bitterness. "If it can't
be beaten down, better the world _should_ come to an end."

Robin put out her hand and caught his