eered to death by the others,
who cried "Fool, anti-social knave, why would you disturb us
with bogeys? There is no darkness. We move and live and
have our being within the light, and unto us is given the
eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and comprehend the
innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool and knave, how dare
you belittle us with the darkness?"

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey
shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes
of the angels, whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out the
more familiar beasts of darkness. And some, having for a moment
seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyena
and the wolf; and some having given up their vanity of the
light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the
eyes of the wolf and the hyena, that it was the flash of the
sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the
angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be
denied, like the flash of fangs.

It was a little while before Easter, in her last year of
college, when Ursula was twenty-two years old, that she heard
again from Skrebensky. He had written to her once or twice from
South Africa, during the first months of his service out there
in the war, and since had sent her a post-card every now and
then, at ever longer intervals. He had become a first
lieutenant, and had stayed out in Africa. She had not heard of
him now for more than two years.

Often her thoughts returned to him. He seemed like the
gleaming dawn, yellow, radiant, of a long, grey, ashy day. The
memory of him was like the thought of the first radiant hours of
morning. And here was the blank grey ashiness of later daytime.
Ah, if he had only remained true to her, she might have known
the sunshine, without all this toil and hurt and degradation of
a spoiled day. He would have been her angel. He held the keys of
the sunshine. Still he held them. He could open to her the gates
of succeeding freedom and delight. Nay, if he had remained true
to her, he would have been the doorway to her, into the
boundless sky of happiness and plunging, inexhaustible freedom
which was the paradise of her soul. Ah, the great range he would
have opened to her, the illimitable endless space for
self-realization and delight for ever.

The one thing she believed in was in the love she had held
for him. It remained shining and complete, a thing to hark back
to. And she sai