looked up and saw her. They looked at each other motionless. He cast
down his paper, sprang up and went to her. He fell to his knees before
her and clasped hers. She looked across, gravely considering, then
laid her hand upon his head. That was all. I saw no more. Husband and
wife? Mother and son? Sinner and Saviour? What do I know?

As with the houses, homes of mystery, so with the men and women one
passed; homes, they too, of things hidden yet more deep. The noise of
the streets, at first paralysing, died down to a familiar rumble, and
the ear began to distinguish voices in the tide. Sounds of crying,
calls for help, hailings, laughter, tears, separated themselves and
appealed. You heard them, like the cries of the drowning, drifting by
you upon a dark tide-way. You could do nothing; a word would have
broken the spell. The mask which is always over the face would have
covered the tongue or throttled the larynx. You could do nothing but
hear.

Finally, the passing faces became sometimes penetrable, betrayed by
some chance gleam of the eyes, some flicker of the lips, a secret to
be shared, or conveyed by a hint some stabbing message out of the deep
into the deep. That is what I mean by the soul at the window. Every
one of us lives in a guarded house; door shut, windows curtained. Now
and then, however, you look up above the street level and catch a
glimpse of the scared prisoner inside. He may be a satyr, a fairy, an
ape or an angel; he's a prisoner anyhow, who sometimes comes to the
window and looks strangely out. You may see him there by chance,
saying to himself like Chaucer's Creseyde in the temple, "Ascaunces,
What! May I not stonden here?" And I found out for myself that there
is scarcely a man or woman alive who does not hold such a tenant more
or less deeply within his house.