nd at that she drew in her breath. Then the hall
door closed, but, for a long time afterwards, she stood there without
moving.

CHAPTER III

RODDY MOVES

"... But the Red Dwarf, although as malevolent as possible,
found that his ill-temper had no effect against true love,
which always won in the end, even with quite stupid people."

_Grimm's Fairy Tales._

I

It would have been quite impossible for Roddy to have given any clear
description of his experiences since the event of his accident. There,
surely, like a gleaming sword, that cut his life into two pieces, the
fact itself was visible enough, and there floated before him, again and
again, the casual canter, the especial view that was before him just
then, a view of undulating Downs, somewhere to his left white chalk
hollows in grey hills and to his right a blue strip of sea, the wonder
that was in his mind about Rachel, his thoughts chasing back over all
the incidents of their life together, then suddenly the jerk, his
consciousness of falling with the ground rising in a high wall to oppose
him, and then darkness.

After that there was nightmare in which pain and Rachel, Rachel and
pain, mingled and parted, were confused and then separate, and with them
danced shapes and figures, sometimes in a turmoil that was horrible,
sometimes in silence that was the most terrible of all. Clear after that
first period of misty confusion was the day when he was told his fate.

He had come out from the heart of the more terrible pain--No longer had
he to lie, knowing that soon, after another minute's peace, agony would
rise before him like a creature with a wet pale malignant face, and then
after looking upon him for a moment, would bend down and, with its
horrible damp fingers, would twist and turn his bones one against
another until the supreme moment came when nothing mattered and no
agony, however bad, could touch his indifferent soul.

He was now simply weak, weak, weak--nothing mattered. In his dream he
fancied that someone had said that he would never rise from his back
again. For days after that it lingered far away from his actual
consciousness. Really it had not mattered; something, this dream, that
concerned him, but what could concern him except that people should keep
quiet and not fuss?

For instance he loved to have Rachel with him, he was miserable were she
not there, but at the same time he was conscious that she _did_ fus