fluence. He wanted to go away
from her. He rested in the knowledge that to-morrow he was going
away, his life was really elsewhere. His life was
elsewhere--his life was elsewhere--the centre of his
life was not what she would have. She was different--there
was a breach between them. They were hostile worlds.

"You will come back to me?" she reiterated.

"Yes," he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an
appointment, not as a man returning to his fulfilment.

So she kissed him, and went indoors, lost. He walked down to
the Marsh abstracted. The contact with her hurt him, and
threatened him. He shrank, he had to be free of her spirit. For
she would stand before him, like the angel before Balaam, and
drive him back with a sword from the way he was going, into a
wilderness.

The next day she went to the station to see him go. She
looked at him, she turned to him, but he was always so strange
and null--so null. He was so collected. She thought it was
that which made him null. Strangely nothing he was.

Ursula stood near him with a mute, pale face which he would
rather not see. There seemed some shame at the very root of
life, cold, dead shame for her.

The three made a noticeable group on the station; the girl in
her fur cap and tippet and her olive green costume, pale, tense
with youth, isolated, unyielding; the soldierly young man in a
crush hat and a heavy overcoat, his face rather pale and
reserved above his purple scarf, his whole figure neutral; then
the elder man, a fashionable bowler hat pressed low over his
dark brows, his face warm-coloured and calm, his whole figure
curiously suggestive of full-blooded indifference; he was the
eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his
own life he would have no drama.

The train was rushing up. Ursula's heart heaved, but the ice
was frozen too strong upon it.

"Good-bye," she said, lifting her hand, her face laughing
with her peculiar, blind, almost dazzling laugh. She wondered
what he was doing, when he stooped and kissed her. He should be
shaking hands and going.

"Good-bye," she said again.

He picked up his little bag and turned his back on her. There
was a hurry along the train. Ah, here was his carriage. He took
his seat. Tom Brangwen shut the door, and the two men shook
hands as the whistle went.

"Good-bye--and good luck," said Brangwen.

"Thank you--good-bye."

The train moved off. Skrebensky stood at the carriage window,
wavi