THE WINDOW 73it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomablydeep; but now and again we rise to the surface andthat is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed toher limitless. There were all the places she had notseen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing asidethe thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. Thiscore of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. Therewas freedom, there was peace, there was, most wel-come of all, a summoning together, a resting on aplatform of stability. Not as oneself did one findrest ever, in her experience (she accomplished heresomething dexterous with her needles), but as awedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost thefret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lipsalways some exclamation of triumph over life whenthings came together in this peace, this rest, thiseternity; and pausing there she looked out to meetthat stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke,the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watch-ing them in this mood always at this hour one couldnot help attaching oneself to one thing especially ofthe things one saw; and this thing, the long steadystroke, was her stroke. Often she found herselfsitting and looking, sitting and looking, with herwork in her hands until she became the thing shelooked at—that light for example. And it would liftup on it some little phrase or other which had beenlying in her mind like that—'Children don't forget,children don't forget'—which she would repeat andbegin adding to it, It will end, It will end, she said.It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added:We are in the hands of the Lord.
