St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
it--figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
whispering knowingly.
Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
and topped by that skeleton dome.
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