CHAPTER XIIHalf an hour later all the sounds in the house had ceased. The sounds of footsteps going to and fro in the wing above the study, the noise of water running into the bath and out of it, the gurgling and murmuring in the pipes as the cistern filled again—all these were past. Refreshed by his bath, Elliot had fallen asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. The house lay in that profound silence which falls upon a place of human habitation when conscious thought and movement are withdrawn. There is a special quality about this silence of a sleeping house. It is a silence of life, as different from the empty stillness of a deserted dwelling as sleep is different from death.
Phyllida had dreamed that she was walking in a garden and it was dusk. The air was full of the sc
