"
Thus she stumbled on the lowest note of pessimism: that conscious
intelligence is a supreme mistake. But the significance of her idea she
knew not.
Then Joan rose up, shivered with a sudden sense of chill, stamped her feet,
and caused the row of tails below the mantel to vanish.
"Goose-flaish down the spine do mean as theer's feet walkin' 'pon my
graave, I s'pose," she thought, as a heavy knock at the front door
interrupted her reflections. Hastening to open it, Joan found the
postman--a rare visitor at Drift. He handed her a letter and prepared to
depart immediately.
"I'm grievous afeared o' Buryas Bridge tonight," he said; "when I comed
over, two hour back, the water was above the arches, an', so like's not, I
won't get 'cross 'tall if it's riz higher. An' somethin' cruel's comin',
I'll lay my life, 'fore marnin'. This pitch-black silence be worse than the
noise o' the rain."
He vanished down the hill, and, returning to the kitchen, Joan lighted a
candle and examined the letter. A fit of trembling shook the girl to the
hidden seat of her soul as she did so, for her own name greeted her, in
neat printed letters akin to those on the superscription of another letter
she had received in the past. From John Barron it was that this
communication came, and the reception of it begot a wild chaos of mind
which now carried Joan headlong backward. Images swept through her brain
with the bewildering rapidity and brilliance of lightning flashes; she was
whirled and tossed on a flood of thoughts; a single sad-eyed figure
retained permanency and rose clear and separated itself from the
phantasmagorial procession of personages and events wending through her
mind, dissolving each into the other, stretching the circumstances of eight
short months into an eternity, crowding the solemn aisles of time past with
shadows of those emotions which had reigned over the dead spring time of
the year and were themselves long dead.
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