It had seemed to Julia, sitting two rows behind Grace Kimlock, that something must happen during the long service to take away the sense of futility—for all his anguish, for all his last desperate gesture to communicate something—what?—Edward Cavan now in the last few moments had in some terrible way ceased to exist. She had been a little disturbed by Angela Goldberg’s sitting down beside her. No doubt, Julia thought, she felt lonely in this church and had sought Julia out as someone she knew. Yet it had seemed an intrusion; the consciousness of the silent, slightly resisting presence at her side kept Julia from losing herself, from identifying herself somewhere, somehow, with something, and no longer to be dangling, as she felt, in a vacuum. She had been brought up in this church and did not come back without a pang, without an examination of conscience, since, for some years, she had ceased to practice her religion. The sound of the words was soothing, but they had no meaning. They did not console really or explain the presence here of them all, the presence of Edward Cavan dead by his own will. It seemed to her even that they evaded, that they smoothed over with their golden beauty what had to remain naked and terrible to be realized. She felt that they were all being swaddled up in the hush, among the flowers, in the music of the organ, in the ritualistic solemnity from something which must break through and pierce them alive again. And strangely she began almost in spite of herself, to pray, as if the vertical appeal of prayer might somehow make it possible for the horizontal communion, which she craved, to take place at last. It was a felt prayer, hardly articulated in which the words “understanding,” “peace,” became key words. “If you could help us to understand and to forgive each other,” she said silently, thinking of Damon, far away now among the ushers, Damon who had no idea how much of the time she resented, almost hated him. “Oh keep Edward in our hearts,” she prayed, reaching at last the still place in herself which she had come to find. “Make him whole and active within us, able to overcome our guilt.”