He scarcely looked as if he heard.

From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea.

Close at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved in their sleep.

But Piers made neither sound nor movement.

He stood like an image of stone.
Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to be uttered.