The cold rose from within.
First in her gaze. Before, he had seen in it an answer, a completion, the stillness between the notes. Now, meeting her eyes for an instant by the dead fire, he saw in them appraisal. Something that seemed to him a silent judgment. Resentment flared at once in his chest: “And why did you not stop me?”
Then the cold entered the earth. It was no longer a continuation of his palms, as before, but matter that had to be subdued. The hoe he had carved from wood met resistance for the first time — a dull, deadened blow against stone that rang with pain through his shoulders. This was no longer a child’s game of blocks — this was a struggle.
They lived in the same place, at the borders of the garden. The flowers still bloomed close by. The birds sang, but now it was not music, only noise. Beauty existed apart from them, behind a transparent, invisible wall. They could see beauty, but they could no longer be part of it.
He tried. Once, noticing that a young sapling had bent under the pressing wind, he straightened it and propped it with a stone, as he had done before. He waited for the approving silence, for counsel, for play — but the only answer was the rustle of leaves in the wind. The sapling did not know him. The world had ceased to answer.
The chapter goes on in the book.