e laugh. "Yes--well, it's
not so bad----" he was hesitating. The pale gleam was
strong in his eyes, he was looking at her steadily, watching
her, as an animal might. Something leaped in her soul. She knew
he was going to suggest to her that she should be as he was.

"Would you like to stay here with me?" he asked,
tentatively.

She blenched with fear and with the intense sensation of
proffered licence suggested to her.

They had come to the gate.

"How?" she asked. "You aren't alone here."

"We could marry," he answered, in the strange,
coldly-gleaming insinuating tone that chilled the sunshine into
moonlight. All substantial things seemed transformed. Shadows
and dancing moonlight were real, and all cold, inhuman, gleaming
sensations. She realized with something like terror that she was
going to accept this. She was going inevitably to accept him.
His hand was reaching out to the gate before them. She stood
still. His flesh was hard and brown and final. She seemed to be
in the grip of some insult.

"I couldn't," she answered, involuntarily.

He gave the same brief, neighing little laugh, very sad and
bitter now, and slotted back the bar of the gate. Yet he did not
open. For a moment they both stood looking at the fire of sunset
that quivered among the purple twigs of the trees. She saw his
brown, hard, well-hewn face gleaming with anger and humiliation
and submission. He was an animal that knows that it is subdued.
Her heart flamed with sensation of him, of the fascinating thing
he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense
of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He
had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.

She turned away, she turned round from him, and saw the east
flushed strangely rose, the moon coming yellow and lovely upon a
rosy sky, above the darkening, bluish snow. All this so
beautiful, all this so lovely! He did not see it. He was one
with it. But she saw it, and was one with it. Her seeing
separated them infinitely.

They went on in silence down the path, following their
different fates. The trees grew darker and darker, the snow made
only a dimness in an unreal world. And like a shadow, the day
had gone into a faintly luminous, snowy evening, while she was
talking aimlessly to him, to keep him at a distance, yet to keep
him near her, and he walked heavily. He opened the garden gate
for her quietly, and she was entering into her own pleasances