CHAPTER XXX
THE BARRIERS DOWN
WHITISH-GREY in the full, bright moonlight the road stretched out ahead, and all the earth seemed bathed in the soft radiance and there was a great quiet, a deep, still serenity over all, as though Nature herself were taking her repose—no sound but the rhythmic beat of the horse's hoofs, the pleasant rattle of the buggy's wheels.
From the brow of the hill, where, in another world it seemed now, in the far past, in the long ago, Varge had first seen the penitentiary at sunrise, the prison stood outlined in the calm light, the walls traced in black, uncouth shapes, the great dome of the central building rising spectre-like against the sky. Around it, the fields, the little village, the sweep of country, white-cloaked in the moon-rays near at hand, gradually merged, blurred and indistinct with distance, into shadow, into night.
What men say to each other when their hearts are full, Doctor Kreelmar and Varge had said. They were silent now—as they had been during the last half of the drive back from Berley Falls.
Upon Varge was still a strange sense of unreality; still but the hesitant understanding when the mind is numbed for a time in the face of some great crisis and there lingers the fancy that one is but living in a world of dreams; vivid dreams, it is true, but dreams from
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