d.

'Good-night, then,' he whispered formally, almost coldly.

I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.

We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.

'Too late for the lift,' I murmured out there with him in the vast,
glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above
us and below us into the mysterious unseen.

He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted
steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the
baluster. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below
me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he
resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I
had glimpses of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then
I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the
distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.

This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself
had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist's habit, I ran
off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the
temples and the awkward attitude of death; the discovery, the rush for
the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking
coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and
impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he
lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his
spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was
inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my
mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous,
bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and
injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense
fact that he was mine.

'How calm I am!' I thought.

It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized
the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.

III

I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give
the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind
factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank's coming,
and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined
that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it
occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which