His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the feeling of her presence close by.

He leant against a tree, forming her name beneath his breath: "Katharine, Katharine," he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the trees as she passed them.

She seemed so definitely opposed to the vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of impatience.
"Katharine, Katharine," he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with her.

He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial things--the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their belief in a common reality--all this slipped from him.

So he might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one woman.