wined her body about her mistress.]

After awhile the rain came down on their flushed, hot limbs,
startling, delicious. A sudden, ice-cold shower burst in a great
weight upon them. They stood up to it with pleasure. Ursula
received the stream of it upon her breasts and her limbs. It
made her cold, and a deep, bottomless silence welled up in her,
as if bottomless darkness were returning upon her.

So the heat vanished away, she was chilled, as if from a
waking up. She ran indoors, a chill, non-existent thing, wanting
to get away. She wanted the light, the presence of other people,
the external connection with the many. Above all she wanted to
lose herself among natural surroundings.

She took her leave of her mistress and returned home. She was
glad to be on the station with a crowd of Saturday-night people,
glad to sit in the lighted, crowded railway carriage. Only she
did not want to meet anybody she knew. She did not want to talk.
She was alone, immune.

All this stir and seethe of lights and people was but the
rim, the shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted
very much to be on the seething, partially illuminated shore,
for within her was the void reality of dark space.

For a time Miss Inger, her mistress, was gone; she was only a
dark void, and Ursula was free as a shade walking in an
underworld of extinction, of oblivion. Ursula was glad, with a
kind of motionless, lifeless gladness, that her mistress was
extinct, gone out of her.

In the morning, however, the love was there again, burning,
burning. She remembered yesterday, and she wanted more, always
more. She wanted to be with her mistress. All separation from
her mistress was a restriction from living. Why could she not go
to her to-day, to-day? Why must she pace about revoked at
Cossethay whilst her mistress was elsewhere? She sat down and
wrote a burning, passionate love-letter: she could not help
it.

The two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to
fuse into one, inseparable. Ursula went to Winifred's lodging,
she spent there her only living hours. Winifred was very fond of
water,--of swimming, of rowing. She belonged to various
athletic clubs. Many delicious afternoons the two girls spent in
a light boat on the river, Winifred always rowing. Indeed,
Winifred seemed to delight in having Ursula in her charge, in
giving things to the girl, in filling and enrichening her
life.

So that Ursula developed rapidly during th