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Casting one glance of love and loyalty toward her friends, Elfreda vanished into her room, and wise Miriam took care not to enter the room until the stout girl's moment of self-communion had passed.
During this time, she had experienced first, two or three days of triumph, excitement, congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, death; then came a day whose hours filed slowly by her, each laden with some remnant, some remaining fragment of the dreadful time so lately ended a day which, closing at last, left the past a fading shore behind her and turned her eyes toward the broad sea of the future.
Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss ... crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower."
His life had been a scene of such constant excitement since his return to England, that he had enjoyed little opportunity of indulging in calm self-communion; and now that he was at Armine, and alone, the contrast between his past and his present situation struck him so forcibly that he could not refrain from falling into a reverie upon his fortunes.
And the next day passed in the same way; not an hour, not a moment could she get for privacy or uninterrupted self-communion. At last she determined to write to Laura Wykoff, to which, of course, her mother could make no objection. But she dared not mention the name of Theodore, or allude to her present restrained condition, except remotely, for fear that her mother would ask to see the letter.
Then Everard disappointed a crowd of admiring friends by disappearing through a side gate and going home across the fields, even waving back his young sisters, who would have followed him. "I could not stand it," he said, on reaching home half an hour after the others, though his way had been much shorter, he having spent the interim in self-communion beneath the shade of a friendly oak.
A moment's silent self-communion, and he went on with a rush. "I say, listen. Shall I come along, too?" "Come along?" "To the station. With you." "What on earth for?" "To see you through the opening stages. Break the ice and all that sort of thing. Nothing like collecting a gang, you know. Moments when a feller needs a friend and so forth.
It is a wholly different thing to feel one's self the object of a conscientious visitation. In the latter case, one longs to throw a whiskbroom at the head of the entering guest, longs to have it hit him, brush end on. Moreover, it is a peculiarity of self-communion in the watches of the night, to have the least lovely theory strike one as the more unassailable.
He would not interrupt the workings of the child's soul by further words, and turning away toward another part of the graveyard, he left the boy to his self-communion.
In this lonely self-communion she seems to reason, reflect, and argue; if she spell a word wrong with the fingers of her right hand, she instantly strikes it with her left, as her teacher does, in sign of disapprobation; if right, then she pats herself upon the head, and looks pleased.
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