Status Updates From La Veillée du matin

The iron water distended enormously just beneath him and for an instant, knowing the brutal shock and the pain to which he had now inescapably committed himself, he felt the fatal exhilaration of a falling dream and had just time to dedicate within himself for Thee!, in a silent shout as deafening bright as a smiting of cymbals; then plunged into the smashing cold.

THEY WALKED DOWN the sandstone steps into an air so different from the striving candles and the expiring flowers that they were stopped flat-footed on the gravel. Morning had not yet begun but the night was nearly over. The gravel took all the light there was in the perishing darkness and shed it upward, and in the darkness among the trees below the outbuildings a blossoming dogwood flawed like winter breath.